Computer Architecture: A Quantitative Approach

by John L. Hennessy, David A. Patterson

Publisher: Morgan Kaufmann
ISBN: 012383872X

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Book Description

The computing world today is in the middle of a revolution: mobile clients and cloud computing have emerged as the dominant paradigms driving programming and hardware innovation today. The Fifth Edition of Computer Architecture focuses on this dramatic shift, exploring the ways in which software and technology in the cloud are accessed by cell phones, tablets, laptops, and other mobile computing devices. Each chapter includes two real-world examples, one mobile and one datacenter, to illustrate this revolutionary change.

• Updated to cover the mobile computing revolution
• Emphasizes the two most important topics in architecture today: memory hierarchy and parallelism in all its forms.
• Develops common themes throughout each chapter: power, performance, cost, dependability, protection, programming models, and emerging trends ("What's Next")
• Includes three review appendices in the printed text. Additional reference appendices are available online.
• Includes updated Case Studies and completely new exercises.

Book Reviews

"What has made this book an enduring classic is that each edition is not an update, but an extensive revision that presents the most current information and unparalleled insight into this fascinating and fast changing field. For me, after over twenty years in this profession, it is also another opportunity to experience that student-grade admiration for two remarkable teachers." - From the Foreword by Luiz André Barroso, Google, Inc.

"This is an academic textbook that is also suitable for a far broader readership. Each chapter is organised in the same structure, with the main content supported by case studies and exercises. Having read this book I now have a far better understanding of why processors from all the different designers and manufacturers are so different. Memory hierarchies, multicore architectures and compiler optimisation are all covered in great detail. I was particularly interested in their discussion of graphical processing units and how they are suitable for far more than just graphical workloads. What is great about this book is that it moves with the times. There is a lot of content on processors for mobile computing, and power usage is a pervasive theme. At the other extreme there is an excellent chapter on warehouse scale computers, which offers tremendous insight into the cloud computing infrastructure provided by Google, Amazon and others. If your job has anything to do with IT infrastructure then I recommend this book as a must-read. As an academic text book it has both depth and breadth. And if you're just interested in the topic you'll gain a huge amount of insight into the fundamentals of computer architecture." - The Chartered Institute for IT

About the Author

John L. Hennessy is the tenth president of Stanford University, where he has been a member of the faculty since 1977 in the departments of electrical engineering and computer science. Hennessy is a Fellow of the IEEE and ACM; a member of the National Academy of Engineering, the National Academy of Science, and the American Philosophical Society; and a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. Among his many awards are the 2001 Eckert-Mauchly Award for his contributions to RISC technology, the 2001 Seymour Cray Computer Engineering Award, and the 2000 John von Neumann Award, which he shared with David Patterson. He has also received seven honorary doctorates.

David A. Patterson has been teaching computer architecture at the University of California, Berkeley, since joining the faculty in 1977, where he holds the Pardee Chair of Computer Science. His teaching has been honored by the Distinguished Teaching Award from the University of California, the Karlstrom Award from ACM, and the Mulligan Education Medal and Undergraduate Teaching Award from IEEE. Patterson received the IEEE Technical Achievement Award and the ACM Eckert-Mauchly Award for contributions to RISC, and he shared the IEEE Johnson Information Storage Award for contributions to RAID. He also shared the IEEE John von Neumann Medal and the C & C Prize with John Hennessy. Like his co-author, Patterson is a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, the Computer History Museum, ACM, and IEEE, and he was elected to the National Academy of Engineering, the National Academy of Sciences, and the Silicon Valley Engineering Hall of Fame. He served on the Information Technology Advisory Committee to the U.S. President, as chair of the CS division in the Berkeley EECS department, as chair of the Computing Research Association, and as President of ACM. This record led to Distinguished Service Awards from ACM and CRA.

Customer Reviews

I'm not even sure what to make of a textbook this big -- so big that large swaths of it are available only online. There's certainly more material in here than can productively be covered in a single semester.

The authors were the creators of the MIPS architecture, and although it's no longer the big fish in the tank it's still common enough that it makes a good sample architecture for computer architecture classes. (You would, for example, run into it in cable boxes, some video game consoles, and network hardware.) Needless to say, MIPS gets a lot of case study in here. The book also covers other architectures (in greater detail in the online appendices), but not so much as to be confusing. But it's right about the part where it gets into vector processing that it starts to feel a bit like drinking from a firehose. The book also covers GPUs (a rather important part of most modern desktop computers) and the ins and outs of system and memory control.

But the tsunami really hits when you jump straight into warehouse-level computing -- the massive data clusters run by companies like Google, Apple, and Amazon to provide computing infrastructure for their customers. It feels like you're going in the deep end -- jumping straight past basic clustering directly into issues of real-world architecture and power distribution. This is interesting stuff, but it feels like it's drifting into another course entirely. And the appendices... oh so many, only three of which (largely information on instruction set architecture, which the authors felt was less relevant than in earlier versions of the book) are included in the book itself.