U.S. Stanford University said Wednesday that its former president John Hennessy has been awarded the 2017 ACM A.M. Turing Award, an honor widely viewed as the "Nobel Prize of Computing," for his work pioneering an approach to computer architecture and its impact on the microprocessor industry.
Hennessy shares the prize with his long-time collaborator David Patterson, a retired professor emeritus of computer science at the University of California, Berkeley, said Stanford in a statement.
The U.S. Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) awarded the prize to the two scientists for creating a systematic and quantitative approach to designing faster, lower power, and reduced instruction set computer (RISC) Microprocessors.
Today, 99 percent of more than 16 billion microprocessors produced every year are based on faster, lower power approaches developed in the 1980s by Hennessy and Patterson.
"It is exciting and gratifying to have the Turing Prize recognize the profound impact of John Hennessy's and David Patterson's fundamental research, which has revolutionized an entire industry over a period of decades," said Stanford President Marc Tessier-Lavigne.
He hailed the achievement of the two scientists as "a landmark research partnership across the San Francisco Bay."
The Turing Award, which was awarded by the ACM and carries a 1-million -U.S.-dollar prize, is named for Alan M. Turing, the British mathematician who articulated the mathematical foundation and limits of computing.
Hennessy and Patterson will formally receive their prize at a banquet on June 23 in the U.S. city of San Francisco.
