Yale Patt has been awarded the prestigious 2025 Okawa Prize by the Okawa Foundation for Information and Telecommunications. Patt was honored for “pioneering and outstanding research in high-performance microprocessor architectures, especially involving instruction level parallelism, superscalar processor design, and high accuracy branch prediction.”

Yale Patt is a professor and holds the Virginia H. Cockrell Centennial Chair in Engineering in the Chandra Family Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering at The University of Texas at Austin.

The Okawa Prize is intended to pay tribute to and make public recognition of persons who have made outstanding contributions to the research, technological development and business in the information and telecommunications fields, internationally. Each year the award is given to one Japanese and one non-Japanese engineer. Dr. Tadashi Watanabe was the other recipient for 2026.

Yale was elected to the National Academy of Engineering in 2014, among the highest professional distinctions bestowed upon an engineer.

He has received a number of awards for his research and teaching, most notably the highest honor in his specialty, computer architecture, the 1996 IEEE/ACM Eckert-Mauchly Award, "for important contributions to instruction level parallelism and superscalar processor design," and the highest honor in computer science education, the 2000 ACM Karl V. Karlstrom Outstanding Educator Award. He also received the Benjamin Franklin Medal for Computer and Cognitive Science from the Franklin Institute in 2016, and he holds the title of University Distinguished Teaching Professor.