Computer Organization and Design, Fourth Edition: The Hardware Software Interface (The... at Dominant Systems Book Store

Patterson and Hennessy have greatly improved what was already the gold standard of textbooks. In the rapidly-evolving field of computer architecture, they have woven an impressive number of recent case studies and contemporary issues into a framework of time-tested fundamentals.--Fred Chong, University of California, Santa Barbara

The new coverage of multiprocessors and parallelism lives up to the standards of this well-written classic. It provides well-motivated, gentle introductions to the new topics, as well as many details and examples drawn from current hardware.--John Greiner, Rice University

Customer Reviews & Comments
First I will mention that I had no problem with the actual content presented in the chapters. This was a textbook for my Computer Architecture class, and the figures and presentation were fine. I really like the "pitfalls & fallacies" section of each chapter, as well as the brief sections looking at how real processors apply ideas and looking at the histories of the processors. (Go ARM!) Now, as I mentioned this was a textbook for my class, and we were often assigned problems at the end of each chapter to do as homework. These problems are the sole reason I give this book a two star. There are so many problems that are very ambiguous as to what they are asking for. Also, I don't mind having multiple parts to a problem, but they went overboard with it. You have one problem with an A and B part, then the next with A-F that you need to perform for both A and B parts of the problem before. It would be MUCH more straightforward just to make all of these sections their own individual program and it would clear up a lot of the confusion that my whole class experienced.

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