Perhaps the project where his innovations were most noted was in the IBM 801minicomputer, where his realization that matching the design of the architecture's instruction set to the relatively simple instructions actually emitted by compilers could allow high performance at a low cost.
In 2002, he was made a Fellow of the Computer History Museum "for his development and implementation of reduced instruction set computer architecture and program optimization technology."[9]
^ ab
Schofield, Jack (2002-07-27). "John Cocke". The Guardian. Retrieved 2011-05-10. Cocke's idea was to use fewer instructions, but design chips that performed simple instructions very quickly. [...] Later, this approach became known as reduced instruction set computing (Risc) [...]
^Jelinek, Frederick, "The Dawn of Statistical ASR and MT", Computational Linguistics, 35(4), 2009, pp. 483-494, doi: 10.1162/coli.2009.35.4.35401
^John Cocke, The search for performance in scientific processors: the Turing Award lecture. Communications of the ACM, Volume 31 Issue 3, March 1988, Pages 250-253. doi:10.1145/42392.42394