By Tom Abate
John Hennessy, Stanford president emeritus and the James F. and Mary Lynn Gibbons Professor in the School of Engineering, will share the 2020 BBVA Foundation Frontiers of Knowledge Award in Information and Communication Technologies for his role in creating the approach to central processing unit (CPU) design used in 99 percent of the microprocessors in the world today, and for co-authoring the textbook on computer systems architecture that, three decades and five revisions after its introduction, remains the technical foundation for training computer architecture students in universities everywhere.
John Hennessy (Image credit: L.A. Cicero)
Hennessy shares the award with David Patterson, a professor emeritus of computer science at the University of California, Berkeley, and co-author of the landmark text