Computer Architecture: A Quantitative Approach, Second Edition (Hardcover)

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Editorial Reviews

Amazon.com Review

An excellent successor to Hennessy and Patterson's Computer Organization and Design, this book presents computer architecture and design as something quantitative that can be studied in the context of real running systems rather than in an abstract format. The concepts are again grounded in real machine architectures and many of the examples are contemporary architectures, such as PowerPC chips and Intel 80x86. Computer Architecture follows the same outline as its predecessor, but covers information in more depth, moving rapidly from introductory discussions to issues just shy of computer design research. The format again includes an excellent mix of exercises and historical background. This book is recommended for people with some experience in digital design--or people who have read and understood the authors' first text.

Review

Read the entire review, including a chapter-by-chapter analysis of this book.

Once in a great while, a landmark computer-science book is published. Computer Architecture: A Quantitative Approach, Second Edition, is such a book. In an era of fluff computer books that are, quite properly, remaindered within weeks of publication, this book will stand the test of time, becoming lovingly dog-eared in the hands of anyone who designs computers or has concerns about the performance of computer programs.

Hennessy and Patterson are well-known researchers in the field of computation. Hennessy started the MIPS project at Stanford and is one of the cofounders of MIPS Computer Systems. Patterson led the design of the RISC-1 computer project and the RAID storage project at Berkeley.

Computer Architecture offers two significant benefits to readers of DDJ. First, it provides answers to those nagging questions such as: "Why don't those idiot chip designers just add more {registers}{cache}?" Second, once you have read it, you are in a fine position to win bets with other armchair computer designers on almost any hardware-related topic.

Seriously, the book will give you the ability to understand the fundamental issues that influence the design of modern computer systems. Moreover, it will provide you with the analytical methods you need to quantify real-world design choices...

Computer Architecture: A Quantitative Approach is insightful, thought-provoking, and meticulously edited. It may appear to be expensive, but the per-page cost is low and the per-insight cost is even lower. The exercises at the end of each chapter of the text are relevant and will further increase the reader's understanding of computer architecture. I highly recommend this book. A well-edited gold mine of ideas, it will serve its readers well. I consider it required reading for all professional programmers and for those who are seriously involved with the design and performance of computer systems old and new. -- Robert Benecky, Dr. Dobb's Journal -- Dr. Dobb's Journal

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Product Details

• Hardcover: 1000 pages
• Publisher: Morgan Kaufmann Publishers; 2nd edition (1996)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 1558603298
• ISBN-13: 978-1558603295
• Product Dimensions: 9.5 x 7.8 x 2.1 inches
• Shipping Weight: 4.4 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 4.1 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (19 customer reviews)
• Amazon.com Sales Rank: #802,230 in Books (See Bestsellers in Books)

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

8 of 8 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars A tough book to get through - but worth the effort., December 3, 1996

By A Customer

Need to get inside the hardware, and don't mind a few bumps along the way? Computer Architecture: A Quantitative Approach will take you deeper than you probably ever thought you wanted to go. The focus is on uniprocessor architecture, although it does provide introductory coverage of multiprocessors. This work covers the various designs and alternatives for instruction sets, pipelining, cache, memory, I/O, etc. and provides current examples as well as historical references. The weakness of the book is that the exercises at the end of each chapter go beyond the scope of the material covered. Although certainly worthwhile and complimentary to the material presented in the chapters, the exercises seem to be material for the next level. The authors should either make the exercises more related to the chapter explanations and examples, or they should offer relevant extended references. It would also be helpful if they provided an answer set to a percentage of the exercises. The user of the 2nd edition is well advised to grab the errata file from the publisher, see Preface, as there are many errors in the printing. Overall, I would recommend this book to those who are serious about gaining an advanced understanding of modern computer architecture. Be advised, a good basic understanding is necessary before tackling this work.

12 of 14 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars PhD. In a box, August 20, 2000

By	"d0gbert" (Quincy, IL USA) - See all my reviews

This book is one of the few books out there that manages to have a huge page count but remain packed with the same fluedity and comprehension, and ciriculum, that makes you feel as though you wasted your money on graduate school, and could have just spent 80 some odd for this book. If you have ever been frustrated with the level of incompetance and stupidity in the reatail computer book market, where everone and their dogs sisters brother's uncle sallys, cosins sister is either a for dummies author, or some fool writing about thier experience with Windows, than this is the book for you, This book will take you to new levels of understanding of computers, the authors cover things like what Pipelining really is, and things like why MIPS is not a good mesure for performance, etc. At the end of each chapter the authors have a section called Fallicies and Pitfalls, which give you inside perspective from the Experts as to why some things are bad mesuremnts and or Engineering philospies, that exist today. Rest assured also that this book is not written by no name Professors. The first Author D. Patterson, along with Carlo Sequin coined the name RISC for there newly fashiond RISC chip, the second J. Hennesey invented the what he called the MIPS chip, both higly important chips to Companys like Sun and SGI and both authors have numorus awards for Engineering and Education and hail from highly acreddited universities, namely UC Berkly and Stanford. This book will not leave you waxing and waining for more, but rather fill you with the understanding and knowledge that are key to making a good engineer. Put simply, this book will not teach you the basics, this book will teach you the "advanced" and I really do mean the adVANced.

14 of 17 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Only for the serious student, July 3, 2001

By	Joshua B Fryman (USA) - See all my reviews

To address some of the cocerns others have raised, let me start by saying this is absolutely *the* reference book used in all of Computer Science and Computer Engineering. This is the book they use to teach the very basic and the most advanced classes. So bear that in mind.

If you are not a serious student, this book will be difficult to work through. If you are lazy and unwilling to really sit down and think about the material here, you won't be able to comprehend it well enough to solve the problems.

But, if you have a desire to learn this material and approach it with an open mind, you'll be delighted with the content. I wish it went more in-depth into modern processor design issues, but it lays the groundwork for understanding not only where we have all come from, but leads to where we're going, and why.

No other single book covers such a huge and complex topic so clearly and simply. But if you're unwilling to work at it, be prepared to hate the book.

This book walks you through the evolution of the computer architecture, touching on all the core concepts: basic operation in an ALU, cache systems, memory management, branch prediction, multiprocessor interconnects, specific processor designs, pipelining, and so much more. There's no better book to put on your desk.