Dave Patterson and John Hennessy, two San Francisco Bay Area professors now associated with Google, have won the computing industry’s top prize for revolutionizing processors with a technology called RISC.

The pair won the 2017 A.M. Turing Award from the Association for Computing Machinery, a $1 million prize named after Alan Turing, the British researcher who famously helped crack German Enigma codes in World War II and lay the foundations of computer science. The high-prestige award is considered the Nobel Prize for computer science.

RISC, (Reduced Instruction Set Computing), gave processors a major performance boost, fueled the growth of upstarts such as Silicon Graphics and Sun Microsystems, and paved the way for today’s smartphone industry. It’s been a remarkable success over the last three decades, and one emblematic of the Silicon Valley ethos of throwing out the old way of doing things.

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