Rate My Professor Yale Patt

Yale Patt is a Professor in the Department of Computer Science, College of Natural Sciences, and the Chandra Family Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering at the University of Texas at Austin, where he holds the Virginia H. Cockrell Centennial Chair in Engineering and serves as University Distinguished Teaching Professor. He earned a B.S. in Electrical Engineering from Northeastern University in 1962, followed by an M.S. in 1963 and a Ph.D. in 1966 from Stanford University. Patt's career encompasses faculty appointments at Cornell University (1966-1967), North Carolina State University (1969-1976), San Francisco State University (1976-1989), University of California, Berkeley as Visiting Professor (1979-1988), University of Michigan (1988-1999), and the University of Texas at Austin since 1999. He served active duty as a Captain in the U.S. Army from 1967 to 1969 and consulted extensively for DEC, NCR, Motorola, and Intel.

Patt's research focuses on computer architecture and microarchitecture, including pioneering work on instruction-level parallelism, superscalar processor design, the HPS microarchitecture, and two-level adaptive branch prediction. He has published more than 200 refereed papers, earning over a dozen best paper awards and multiple Test of Time awards, and co-authored the textbook 'Introduction to Computing Systems: From Bits and Gates to C/C++ and Beyond' (McGraw-Hill, first edition 2001; second edition 2004; third edition 2020), adopted by more than 300 universities worldwide. Patt has supervised 33 Ph.D. dissertations. His influence is evidenced by major awards such as election to the National Academy of Engineering (2014), IEEE/ACM Eckert-Mauchly Award (1996), Benjamin Franklin Medal for Computer and Cognitive Science (2016), ACM Karl V. Karlstrom Outstanding Educator Award (2000), IEEE Emanuel R. Piore Medal (1995), IEEE Wallace W. McDowell Award (1999), IEEE Charles Babbage Award (2005), IEEE B. Ramakrishna Rau Award (2011), IEEE Harry H. Goode Memorial Award (2013), and Okawa Prize (2025). He is a Fellow of IEEE and ACM, and has received numerous teaching honors including the Friar Centennial Teaching Fellowship.