Computer Architecture: A Quantitative Approach, 4th Edition

I'm using this book for a graduate course in Computer System Design. It's a great book, well put together, and very interesting. What is needed is a new edition. This book was written during the days of the single core processor speed wars around 2005. Since then there was the core war (2 cores, 4 cores, 6 cores on desktop computer systems), and today the explosion in technical advances with mobile devices. A year ago it was the speed war up to the 1 GHz mark, and today mobile hand-held devices are being released with 1 GHz dual-core processors, and even announcements of quad core mobile devices by the end of the year. It's a much different world than it was in the Pentium 4 days. The information, equations, etc are spot on, as this is the bible for this information. But reading a book that often references 6-7 year old technologies as current or up and coming, at times it feel more like reading a well written history book. It would be interesting to see references and discussions on the computer architectures in modern mobile devices, as these pocket sized computer systems are increasingly becoming a part of everyone's lives today.

This book isn't for the timid. It goes deep into several recent CPU designs and explains why the architectures turned out the way they did. There is decent coverage of RISC versus CISC ideas, and why CISC now dominates (hint: it is a combination of luck, marketing, and massive amounts of available transistors, plus new ways of instruction-level parallelism).It does not cover the absolute latest processors. But it doesn't have to. It will give you the background needed that when you go to the website that have technical details of a new architecture (e.g. Ars Technica), chances are good you will know the concepts they reference.Who shouldn't buy this: Programmer's in high level languages expecting to learn some black magic way to speed up your code. Even assembly language programmers have been mostly sidelined by the power of a modern CPU to optimize high-level languages.

This is an older edition, but I can't think of any better textbook for learning computer architecture.

For those who have never read this book, I'd emphasize that this is not a computer architecture book that explains some basic stuffs. Instead, this book focuses more on the performance aspect of the computers and I'd say this is the ONLY worthwhile book that discusses from that viewpoint. So, if you are to study the computer performance, your choice is either reading this book or reading tons of papers published by researchers or both. It means you must have a good understanding on the computer architecture before reading this book.My only complaint is that though the book is available only with paperback now, they didn't reduce the price. It's still worth the price, though.

I've used this book for an Advanced Computer Architecture book in my graduate studies (it seems so has every other graduate course, which has an added bonus).The book falls in line with most educational books - mediocre at best. The samples are weak and seldom useful. This book is best coupled with classes and online material found via search engine of your choice.Many universities take the slides and adapt them to their curriculum and post materials accessible online which may be useful.There are some errors in the book and I have yet to track down the errata (even though they provide a link to a place to find it, seems to be only for professors? Not quite sure what that is about...)I'm a bit biased, I thought learning about RAID systems, cache optimization, memory optimization, etc - would have been a bit more interesting and challenging. I've mostly found it dull, ancient, and redundant (Zing!).

For computer architecture. Bought this book several years ago, but got down to writing the review only now. But that makes me realize how good the book is. Given that I still keep going back to it regularly. Btw, I am a hardware engineer/architect by profession.

I have purchased this book as a textbook for a college course. I have been satisfied with the depth and organization of the book.I think it provided great information for a person who needs understanding of computer architecture .

Wordy, but still not easy to understand. This book is written for professors who already understand this.

This book is now in its 4th edition and remains the benchmark text in its field. I have had the 2nd edition for some time and must admit that the 4th edition is not as easy to follow as it covers a huge amount of new and advanced material.Anyone requiring a gentler introduction should take a look at Jon Stokes' Inside The Machine. It covers much of the same material but with rather less rigor.The key word in the title is Quantitative, there are no 'hand-waving' arguments in this text. Highly recommended but not for the faint-hearted.

The packaging was really good was bubble wrapped. IT IS THE BEST BOOK FOR THE SUBJECT

Sehr gutes Zeug. Gerne mal wieder!!!Entspricht meine Anforderungen.Preis Leistung-Qualität = sehr gut.bin echt zufrieden damit und kann nur empfehlen

Un ouvrage de reference à avoir dans ca bibliothèque pour tout ceux qui s'intéresse à la performance.les divers sujet sur le fonctionnement des architecture y sont abordé (optimisation, fonctionnement du pipeline,...).Excellent investissement.

For a computer architect it is a must have.