
Computer Architecture
A Quantitative Approach
Description
Key Features
- Winner of a 2019 Textbook Excellence Award (Texty) from the Textbook and Academic Authors Association
- Includes a new chapter on domain-specific architectures, explaining how they are the only path forward for improved performance and energy efficiency given the end of Moore’s Law and Dennard scaling
- Features the first publication of several DSAs from industry
- Features extensive updates to the chapter on warehouse-scale computing, with the first public information on the newest Google WSC
- Offers updates to other chapters including new material dealing with the use of stacked DRAM; data on the performance of new NVIDIA Pascal GPU vs. new AVX-512 Intel Skylake CPU; and extensive additions to content covering multicore architecture and organization
- Includes "Putting It All Together" sections near the end of every chapter, providing real-world technology examples that demonstrate the principles covered in each chapter
- Includes review appendices in the printed text and additional reference appendices available online
- Includes updated and improved case studies and exercises
- ACM named John L. Hennessy and David A. Patterson, recipients of the 2017 ACM A.M. Turing Award for pioneering a systematic, quantitative approach to the design and evaluation of computer architectures with enduring impact on the microprocessor industry
Readership
Graduate students and professional computer architects, computer system designers, compiler and system software developers, programmers, application developers
Table of Contents
Printed Text
1. Fundamentals of Quantitative Design and Analysis
2. Memory Hierarchy Design
3. Instruction-Level Parallelism and Its Exploitation
4. Data-Level Parallelism in Vector, SIMD, and GPU Architectures
5. Multiprocessors and Thread-Level Parallelism
6. The Warehouse-Scale Computer
7. Domain Specific Architectures
A. Instruction Set Principles
B. Review of Memory Hierarchy
C. Pipelining: Basic and Intermediate ConceptsOnline
D. Storage Systems
E. Embedded Systems
F. Interconnection Networks
G. Vector Processors
H. Hardware and Software for VLIW and EPIC
I. Large-Scale Multiprocessors and Scientific Applications
J. Computer Arithmetic
K. Survey of Instruction Set Architectures
L. Advanced Concepts on Address Translation
M. Historical Perspectives and References
Product details
- No. of pages: 936
- Language: English
- Copyright: © Morgan Kaufmann 2017
- Published: November 23, 2017
- Imprint: Morgan Kaufmann
- eBook ISBN: 9780128119068
- Paperback ISBN: 9780128119051
About the Authors
John Hennessy

Affiliations and Expertise
David Patterson
Affiliations and Expertise
Ratings and Reviews
Latest reviews
(Total rating for all reviews)
AndrewMcMenamin Sun Oct 14 2018
Realistic overview, sloppy updating
This book makes computer architecture relatable to real applications and seeks to give meaningful insights to evaluating architectures. However, as of the 6th edition of this book, it is obvious that the authors/editors have put minimal effort into updating the examples of the book. There are many errors in the technical aspects of the examples (bit counts, references to nonexistent content, etc. ) that distract readers from the meat of the content. This makes the reader ever skeptical of the authors points and makes the content 5x as long to read, as you must always seek the truth for yourself. This may have been ‘the book’ in the past but is no longer the case.
GhulamAbbas Fri Oct 12 2018
Computer Architecture: A Quantitative Approach
Computer Architecture: A Quantitative Approach