SAN FRANCISCO — In 1980, Dave Patterson, a computer science professor, looked at the future of the world’s digital machines and saw their limits.

With an academic paper published that October, he argued that the silicon chips at the heart of these machines were growing more complex with each passing year. But the machines, he argued, could become more powerful if they used a simpler type of computer chip.

This counterintuitive idea spread across Silicon Valley, driven by the work of Mr. Patterson at the University of California in Berkeley and a second academic, John Hennessy, about 40 miles away at Stanford University. They called it RISC, short for “reduced instruction set computer.”

On Wednesday, the Association for Computing Machinery, the venerable computing society that represents industry professionals across the world, announced that Mr. Patterson and Mr. Hennessy had won this year’s Turing Award, often called the Nobel Prize of computing. They will share a $1 million cash prize.