William Wulf

American computer scientist, then at the University of Virginia's Department of Computer Science, who co-authored, with then-colleague Sally McKee, "Hitting the Memory Wall: Implications of the Obvious" (dated December 1994; published ACM SIGARCH Computer Architecture News 23(1), March 1995) — the paper that coined the term memory wall for the structural mismatch between exponentially improving microprocessor speed and much slower-improving DRAM bandwidth. Matters to this vault as the named originator of the foundational concept the entire memory-bandwidth-bottleneck cluster (claim-memory-wall-named-1994-wulf-mckee, claim-roofline-model-compute-bound-vs-memory-bound, claim-tpu-most-nn-workloads-memory-bandwidth-bound, claim-llm-inference-prefill-decode) traces back to.

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)