David A. Patterson is an American computer scientist who spent most of his career as a professor at the University of California, Berkeley, where he became one of the central figures in modern computer architecture. His biography on the Berkeley EECS site records that he joined Berkeley after graduating from UCLA in 1976, and that he became the Pardee Professor of Computer Science.
Patterson is best known for the Berkeley RISC project. His biography states that he led the design and implementation of RISC-I, likely the first VLSI Reduced Instruction Set Computer, and that this research formed the foundation for the SPARC architecture. Together with David Ditzel he wrote the 1980 paper that named the reduced instruction set approach, and with the RISC-I and RISC-II chips he helped prove that the philosophy could be built in silicon. His research style, as the biography describes it, was to identify critical questions for the computing industry and assemble interdisciplinary teams to answer them with demonstration systems that were later mirrored in commercial products. That style also produced RAID, the redundant array of inexpensive disks, and the Network of Workstations project.
With John Hennessy of Stanford, Patterson co-authored two textbooks, “Computer Organization and Design” and “Computer Architecture: A Quantitative Approach,” that became the standard works in the field. Their quantitative, measurement-driven method for evaluating design choices reshaped how architecture is taught and practiced, and is the work most directly cited in their later Turing recognition.
In his later career Patterson helped launch RISC-V, an open and freely available instruction set architecture developed at Berkeley. He is a co-author of the official RISC-V specifications, including the Berkeley technical report “The RISC-V Instruction Set Manual, Volume I: User-Level ISA,” which carried the reduced instruction set lineage into an open standard now used across academia and industry. He also worked on machine learning hardware, contributing to Google’s Tensor Processing Units.
In 2017 Patterson shared the ACM A.M. Turing Award with John Hennessy, cited for pioneering a systematic, quantitative approach to the design and evaluation of computer architectures with enduring impact on the microprocessor industry. The award recognized a body of work, from the Berkeley RISC chips to the textbooks, that helped make RISC the dominant style in the billions of processors shipped each year.