The Turing Award was handed to two computer chip revolutionaries who made a breakthrough in processor power with a technology called "reduced instruction set computer," or RISC, CNET reported.
San Francisco Bay-area professors Dave Patterson and John Hennessy won the prestigious $1 million prize from the Association for Computing Machinery on Wednesday for their work in designing energy efficient chips in the 1980s, which would go on to unlock processor power that ultimately paved the way for computers and phones.
At the basis of their work is the idea that digital machines were using silicon chips that were growing more complex each year but they theorized that, by using simpler computer chips, these machines could ultimately be more powerful, The New York Times said.
This theory became the crux of RISC, which now features in more than 99 percent of all new chips and fueled upstarts such as Silicon Graphics and Sun Microsystems.
The ACM Turing Award, which is often referred to as the Nobel Prize of computing, was established in 1966 to honor the major contributions made to the computing field.
In a statement, ACM said the two professors' work "underpins our ability to model and analyze the architectures of new processors, greatly accelerating advances in microprocessor design."
ACM President Vicki L. Hanson noted that Hennessy and Patterson's contributions to the energy-efficient RISC-based processors "have helped make possible the mobile and IoT revolutions."
She added that a seminal textbook authored by the duo, "Computer Architecture: A Quantitative Approach," had "advanced the pace of innovation across the industry over the past 25 years by influencing generations of engineers and computer designers."
Commenting on their achievement, Hennessey told the Mercury News that, 20 years ago he thought that another part of the country would challenge the Bay Area's dominance in tech.
"The opposite happened, the Bay Area actually pulled ahead," he said.
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