[HN Gopher] Computer Architecture, Fifth Edition: A Quantitative...
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Computer Architecture, Fifth Edition: A Quantitative Approach
Author : nioj
Score : 62 points
Date : 2024-12-08 21:02 UTC (1 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (dl.acm.org)
(TXT) w3m dump (dl.acm.org)
| nioj wrote:
| I just discovered that this book by John L. Hennessy & David A.
| Patterson is freely available from ACM, so just wanted to share
| it. I came across it by reading this thread from three weeks ago:
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42157558
| GregarianChild wrote:
| The 5th edition is seriously out of date. The last 15 years or so
| have seen massive changes in computer architecture, in particular
| the explosion of all manner of hardware accelerators, including
| modern GPUs.
|
| The 7th edition is supposed to come out on 1 January 2025.
| Koshkin wrote:
| > _seriously_
|
| How seriously though? Also, the _priniples_ behind GPUs and
| their use - unlike maybe their physical realization - have not
| changed much since 2011. (See Chapter 4.)
| mikewarot wrote:
| It's a gift horse, and you say it needs dental work? ;-)
|
| I think most of the essentials remain true today. As for
| hardware accelerators, they're all some variation of SIMD or an
| ASIC built to run a specific algorithm.
|
| Von Neumann stuck us with the program counter, and all the
| waiting that comes along with it. It's almost impossible to
| walk away from his legacy.
| tgma wrote:
| It's actually bad news for students when expensive textbooks
| get updated who go to classes with assignments based on a
| specific edition and their indices get reshuffled and the old
| editions become useless even though the core stuff which are
| unchanged are really the only relevant subset to the syllabus.
| kens wrote:
| This is the September 2011 edition to be, uh, quantitative.
| ThePhysicist wrote:
| There's a new edition coming out next year, and I think this
| edition is already outdated, the most recent one is the 6th
| edition from 2017.
| rhelz wrote:
| I remember when the first edition came out---back in the early
| 90's!!!! I was young, slim, had a full head of hair---and this
| new textbook was the bomb. Vastly better than any previous
| textbook on computer architecture.
|
| I can't believe it is _still_ the best. it 's been like 30 years.
| During that time, so much has happened--the death of
| supercomputer companies like Convex and Cray, SIMD going from
| expensive computers like the MASPAR MP-1 to being on virtually
| every processor, the dot com boom, the rise of google-style
| server farms, etc etc.
|
| And now the transition to neural net processing.
|
| I mean, it is a testament to the authors that they could keep
| their competitors from even thinking about trying to write a
| competing book for so long. It is a great case study in how to
| stay relevant in tech for the long term.
|
| But man, before it came out, every year 2 or 3 new textbooks in
| computer architecture came out, each one detailing the next cool
| thing which computer architectures were being called upon to do.
|
| It's exhibit A of Peter Thiel's case that we are living in an era
| of very low innovation. If Computer Architecture were a really
| healthy field, classes would have to be taught from recently-
| published papers, because it was moving faster than a textbook
| could be published.
|
| Hat's off to the authors, but man, this is really depressing.
| GrumpyYoungMan wrote:
| Vastly? I dunno about that. I was rather fond of Tanenbaum's
| _Structured Computer Organization_.
| hinkley wrote:
| First edition still has a better cover, but the 7th edition one
| isn't... bad.
| cloudripper wrote:
| 6th Edition is available via Internet Archive
|
| https://archive.org/details/computerarchitectureaquantitativ...
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