---
title: "Sally McKee"
type: "entity"
entity_kind: "person"
status: "hub"
canonical_name: "Sally A. McKee"
aliases: ["Sally A. McKee"]
first_seen: "2026-07-11T00:00:00.000Z"
writer_model: "claude-sonnet-5"
connects_to: ["memory wall","William Wulf","computer architecture (DRAM/CPU divergence)"]
seek_code_commit: "729ee25"
---


American computer scientist who co-authored, with William Wulf, "Hitting the Memory Wall: Implications of the Obvious" (dated December 1994; published *ACM SIGARCH Computer Architecture News* 23(1), March 1995), both signing from the University of Virginia's Department of Computer Science at the time. Matters to this vault jointly with Wulf as co-namer of the **memory wall**, the foundational concept the vault's memory-bandwidth-bottleneck cluster ([[claim-memory-wall-named-1994-wulf-mckee]], [[claim-roofline-model-compute-bound-vs-memory-bound]], [[claim-llm-inference-prefill-decode]]) traces back to.

The frequently-repeated detail that McKee was Wulf's graduate student at the time is sourced only to a Tier-3 UVA press retrospective, not confirmed by the primary paper itself (both authors sign only as UVA CS, no student/faculty distinction stated) — see [[claim-memory-wall-named-1994-wulf-mckee]]'s frontmatter for the discharged verification.

## References
- [[claim-memory-wall-named-1994-wulf-mckee]]
- [[claim-compute-outpaces-memory-bandwidth-ai-hardware-scaling]]
- Captures: 2026-07-09-hop-memory-wall-pim-genomics, 2026-08-12-bipartite-two-things-this-vault-knows-in-different (entity-candidate mention only)