David Patterson (computer scientist)

David Andrew Patterson (born November 16, 1947) is an American computer scientist and academic who has held the position of professor of computer science at the University of California, Berkeley since 1976. He is a computer pioneer. He announced retirement in 2016 after serving nearly forty years, becoming a distinguished software engineer at Google. He currently is vice chair of the board of directors of the RISC-V Foundation, and the Pardee Professor of Computer Science, Emeritus at UC Berkeley.

Patterson is noted for his pioneering contributions to reduced instruction set computer (RISC) design, having coined the term RISC, and by leading the Berkeley RISC project. As of 2018, 99% of all new chips use a RISC architecture. He is also noted for leading the research on redundant arrays of inexpensive disks (RAID) storage, with Randy Katz.

His books on computer architecture, co-authored with John L. Hennessy, are widely used in computer science education. Hennessy and Patterson won the 2017 Turing Award for their work in developing RISC.

David Patterson grew up in Evergreen Park, Illinois. He graduated from South High School in Torrance, California. He then attended the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA), receiving his Bachelor of Arts degree in Mathematics in 1969. He continued on to obtain his Master of Science degree in 1970 and PhD in 1976, both in Computer Science at UCLA. Patterson's PhD was advised by David F. Martin and Gerald Estrin.

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 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.

He has advised several notable Ph.D. students, including:

Patterson co-authored seven books, including two with John L. Hennessy on computer architecture: Computer Architecture: A Quantitative Approach (6 editions—latest is ISBN 978-0128119051) and Computer Organization and Design RISC-V Edition: the Hardware/Software Interface (5 editions—latest is ISBN 978-0128122761). 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) (ISBN 978-0999249109).