Berkeley RISC

Berkeley RISC is one of two seminal research projects into reduced instruction set computer (RISC) based microprocessor design taking place under the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency VLSI Project. RISC was led by David Patterson (who coined the term RISC) at the University of California, Berkeley between 1980 and 1984.^[1] The other project took place a short distance away at Stanford University under their MIPS effort starting in 1981 and running until 1984.

Berkeley's project was so successful that it became the name for all similar designs to follow; even the MIPS would become known as a "RISC processor". The Berkeley RISC design was later commercialized by Sun Microsystems as the SPARC architecture, and inspired the ARM architecture.^[2]