John Cocke
Michael J. Flynn views the first RISC system as the IBM 801 design, begun in 1975 by John Cocke and completed in 1980. The 801 developed out of an effort to build a 24-bit high-speed processor to use as the basis for a digital telephone switch. To reach their switching goal of 300 calls per second (1 million per hour) they calculated that the CPU required performance on the order of 12 MIPS, compared to their fastest mainframe machine of the time, the 370/168 which performed at 3.5 MIPS.