Patterson is an important advocate and developer of the concept of
reduced instruction set computing and coined the term "RISC". He led the
Berkeley RISC project from 1980, with
Carlo H. Sequin, where the technique of
register windows was introduced. He is also one of the innovators of the redundant arrays of independent disks (
RAID) together with
Randy Katz and
Garth Gibson. Patterson also led the
Network of Workstations (NOW) project at Berkeley, an early effort in the area of
computer clustering. In 2025, Patterson became Chairman of the Board at
Laude Institute, steering the organization with
Jeff Dean,
Joelle Pineau, and
Andy Konwinski.
Past positions Past chair of the Computer Science Division at U.C. Berkeley and the
Computing Research Association, he served on the Information Technology Advisory Committee for the U.S. President (PITAC) during 2003–05 and was elected president of the
Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) for 2004–06.
Notable PhD students He has advised several notable Ph.D. students, including: • David Ditzel, founder and former president of
Transmeta •
Garth A. Gibson, co-inventor of redundant array of inexpensive disks (
RAID), founder and CTO of
Panasas, professor at
Carnegie Mellon University, and first president and chief executive officer of the
Vector Institute •
Christos Kozyrakis, professor at
Stanford University •
David Ungar, designer of the
Self programming language, and currently researcher at
IBM Research •
Remzi Arpaci-Dusseau, Grace Wahba professor and Chair of Computer Sciences at UW-Madison.
Selected publications Patterson co-authored seven books, including two with
John L. Hennessy on
computer architecture:
Computer Architecture: A Quantitative Approach (6 editions—latest is ) and
Computer Organization and Design RISC-V Edition: the Hardware/Software Interface (5 editions—latest is ). They have been widely used as
textbooks for graduate and undergraduate courses since 1990. His most recent book is with Andrew Waterman on the
open architecture RISC-V:
The RISC-V Reader: An Open Architecture Atlas (1st Edition) (). His articles include: • • • •
Awards and honors Patterson's work has been recognized by about 50 awards for research, teaching, and service, including Fellow of the
Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) and the
Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE), and by election to the
National Academy of Engineering,
National Academy of Sciences, and the
Silicon Valley Engineering Hall of Fame. In 2005, he and Hennessy shared
Japan's Computer & Communication award and, in 2006, he was elected to the
American Academy of Arts and Sciences and the
National Academy of Sciences and received the Distinguished Service Award from the
Computing Research Association. That same year, he was also named a Fellow of the
American Association for the Advancement of Science. In 2008, he won the ACM Distinguished Service Award, the ACM-IEEE Eckert-Mauchly Award, and was recognized by the School of Engineering at
UCLA for Alumni Achievement in Academia. Since then he has won the ACM-SIGARCH Distinguished Service Award, ACM-SIGOPS Hall of Fame Award, and the 2012 Jean-Claude Laprie Award in Dependable Computing from IFIP Working Group 10.4 on Dependable Computing and Fault Tolerance. In 2016 he was given the Richard A. Tapia Achievement Award for Scientific Scholarship, Civic Science and Diversifying Computing. For 2020 he was awarded the
BBVA Foundation Frontiers of Knowledge Award in Information and Communication Technologies. At the 2013 California Raw Championships, he set the American Powerlifting Record for the state of California for his weight class and age group in bench press, dead lift, squat, and all three combined lifts. On February 12, 2015, IEEE installed a plaque at UC Berkeley to commemorate the contribution of RISC-I in Soda Hall at UC Berkeley. The plaque reads: •
IEEE Milestone in Electrical and Computer Engineering • First RISC (Reduced Instruction Set Computing) Microprocessor •
UC Berkeley students designed and built the first VLSI reduced instruction-set computer in 1981. The simplified instructions of RISC-I reduced the hardware for instruction decode and control, which enabled a flat 32-bit address space, a large set of registers, and pipelined execution. A good match to C programs and the Unix operating system, RISC-I influenced instruction sets widely used today, including those for game consoles, smartphones and tablets. On March 21, 2018, he was awarded the 2017 ACM A.M.
Turing Award together with
John L. Hennessy for developing RISC. In 2022 he was awarded the
Charles Stark Draper Prize by the
National Academy of Engineering alongside
John L. Hennessy,
Steve Furber and
Sophie Wilson for contributions to the invention, development, and implementation of
reduced instruction set computer (RISC) chips.
Charitable work From 2003 to 2012 he rode in the annual Waves to Wine MS charity event as part of
Bike MS; a 2-day cycling adventure. He was the top fundraiser in 2006, 2007, 2008, 2009, 2010, 2011, and 2012. ==References==