David Patterson

David Patterson

An American computer architect who led the Berkeley RISC project, co-invented RAID, and co-wrote with John Hennessy the textbook that taught quantitative computer architecture to a generation; the two shared the 2017 Turing Award. At Google he worked on the Tensor Processing Unit, the first widely deployed chip designed specifically for the matrix multiplications that neural networks spend their time on, and has since argued that the end of general-purpose scaling has opened a new golden age of domain-specific architectures. Yann LeCun has made a parallel case from the research side for hardware shaped around the operations deep learning actually uses. (See also: Compute, Yann LeCun, Jim Keller, Inference)