Harm Peter Hofstee was born in the Netherlands and received his Doctorandus in theoretical physics from the University of Groningen, The Netherlands, in 1988. In 1994 he earned his PhD from Caltech; after that, he spent two years on the faculty.Hofstee joined the IBM Austin Research Laboratory in 1996, where he worked on the world's first gigahertz CMOS microprocessor prototype (i.e., the IBM Rivina) and other high-performance microprocessor designs.