John L. Hennessy
is the president of Stanford University, where he has been a member of the
faculty since 1977 in the departments of electrical engineering and computer science. Hennessy
is a Fellow of the IEEE and ACM, a member of the National Academy of Engineering and
the National Academy of Science, and a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.
Among his many awards are the 2001 Eckert-Mauchly Award for his contributions to RISC technology,
the 2001 Seymour Cray Computer Engineering Award, and the 2000 John von Neumann
Award, which he shared with David Patterson. He has also received seven honorary
doctorates.
In 1981, he started the MIPS project at Stanford with a handful of graduate students. After completing
the project in 1984, he took a one-year leave from the university to cofound MIPS Computer
Systems, which developed one of the first commercial RISC microprocessors. After being
acquired by Silicon Graphics in 1991, MIPS Technologies became an independent company in
1998, focusing on microprocessors for the embedded marketplace. As of 2006, over 500 million
MIPS microprocessors have been shipped in devices ranging from video games and palmtop
computers to laser printers and network switches.
David A. Patterson
has been teaching computer architecture at the University
1