Most Helpful Customer Reviews
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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well as historical references.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.
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12 of 14 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
PhD. In a box, August 20, 2000
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.
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14 of 17 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Only for the serious student, July 3, 2001
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.
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