While working on his PhD at Stanford in the 1970s, Kogge invented what is still today considered the fastest way of adding numbers in a computer, the Kogge–Stone Adder process, an approach still used in microprocessors by Intel and other companies.
After receiving his degree, Kogge joined the computer engineering team at IBM.
Peter was the author of the first textbook on pipelining, a now ubiquitous technique for executing multiple instructions in a computer in parallel.
At IBM, Kogge was also the inventor of the world's first multi-core processor, EXECUBE, which Kogge and his team placed on a memory chip in an early effort to solve the data bottleneck problem that Emu is solving today.
In 1994, Kogge joined the University of Notre Dame as a faculty member, the Ted H. McCourtney Professor of Computer Science and Engineering.