Rating: 
Summary: An okay book
Review: The book is quite okay. Intresting at its best and quite confusing at its worst. I think the section on virutal memory and cache is the most confusing of all. Other parts, like performance etc. are very well written. But one factor that goes against the book is that sometimes it delves into too much detail which may not be necesary.Gokul
Rating:
Summary: A Very Nice Book For Begginers
Review: The book is very good in covering the main aspects of the RISC architecture and the modern technics of making a processor faster, such as pipelining. I also thin that the chapter in multi processors is interesting. I belive it is highly recommendable to students
Rating: 
Summary: This is the place to start...
Review: These two great minds have presented their work in a neat at thorough fashion. Every chapter builds on the last with emphasis towards critical elements in computer hardware. I thoroughly enjoyed the book, and the class I took at UCSB!
Rating: 
Summary: Very boring and tedious to read!!
Review: This book has a good potential in teaching students about computer organization. Unfortunately, the authors spend too much time explaining simple concepts which makes the book very boring and tedious to read. For example: the authors spend 335 pages just to explain basic MIPS assembly languages and computer performance. Those concepts could have been explained in 50 pages at most. Giving too much unnecessary detail won't help me to get a better understanding of computer organization. In fact, I get lost because the main topic was buried inside all the unimportant unnecessary details. This book could have been written in 300 pages, which is about a third of the length of the book, and still gives a clear, to the point, concise explanation of computer organization.
Rating:
Summary: GOOD REFERENCE
Review: This book is a comprhensive review of what has been done in the area of computer architecture in the past recent years. It is a good reference for computer architects. Regards,
Rating: 
Summary: OK but you have to know where to find the CORRECT informatio
Review: This book is fine if you read it straight through. Worked fine in class but when used as a reference book it fails because the author often doesn't give the exact answer at first. He abstacts it from the reader until it can be better explained later. Makes looking back at this book hard.
Rating:
Summary: Sufficient material, but strange new methods of pedagogy
Review: This book is one of the standard textbooks for Computer Organization. However the approach of instruction taken by the authors is unconventional, and a reader might or might not find it useful. Here are the points that will be useful to prospective buyers: 1. If this book was ASSIGNED as a course requirement, have no fear. With a good instructor in class as your primary source, the book is fairly easy to understand. Besides, the exercises are well ranked in order of difficulty, and sufficiently varied across levels of difficulty. And they are usually interesting. 2. If you wish to use this as a reference work, be warned. The style is strange, and upside down in places. For example, "examples" are given with wrong usage of Assembly "instructions", because the book has not "got there yet". Later, you are given the "correct version". Some people might like this, some may not. 3. If you are a professional and want a refresher, be warned again. The book labours through pages and pages of simple worked exercises, involving nothing more complicated than a times b divided by c, and then jumps into implementational details. 4. One thing the book must be praised for is its thoroughness. 5. Essentially, the authors have intended that ANYONE not even remotely familiar with the subject should be able to tackle it from the ground up. Thus you have concepts introduced in an EXTREMELY step by step fashion, and no one will complain that the book is "difficult to read", per se. But the authors carry it a little too far, and those readers used to traditional textbook techniques of explanation, will be lost in many places. Those who have no problems with this might complain that the book is too long in places. The most satisfied reader will be one who has no idea of what computers are, and was thrown into this course all of a sudden, and who has a lot of free time, and who has an instructor to guide him through the book and the course.
Rating:
Summary: Quite unconventional, quite useful
Review: This book is quite a strange case. For sure, it is the most widely used around the world for intro courses on Computer Architecturs (CAs). Could it be because Hennessy and Patterson are, at present and since a long time, two of the most prominent researchers in the field, Hennessy being now also President of Stanford University, Patterson a professor at Berkeley. But it would be too reductive to limit the view to this only. So we should move inside the book and try to understand the real (or other) reasons. As an introductory text on CA, the approach is different than the somewhat classical one. Those who'd expect a few introductory chapters on logic design (as, e.g., Mano & Kime's chapters or Murdocca's long appendixes) will find instead a short appendix that describes basic components (gates, registers, clocks and so on) at a high level (never mention digital abstracion & co.). The path then is not a survey of general concepts & principles of CA with eventually some real examples as application. Instead, the process is a strictly step-by-step constructive one: they build from scratch a new system funding the design with plenty of considerations and tips, even with warnings on most common "fallacies and pitfalls". All this done through a very straightforward and clear language and with lots of figures, well paced and presented. As a result, coping with the topics is pretty an easy task, and the most likely result is a thourough understanding of what they present. So what they present ? Substantially, the MIPS, a well known (thanks to this book and their authors too, of course) and widely sold (thanks to its true qualities) RISC processor. The authors have been leaders in the development of the RISC architecture, which admittedly is by now the only good choice for CPU designs since even Intel in its newest architectures reduce all down to the execution of RISC instructions. Anyway, the attention is not only on RISC (and MIPS) architectures: it's "mostly" on these, but there's space for short disgressions in the PowerPC, 80x86 and Pentium Pro (the book is dated 1997) field. This is done through a section named "Real stuff" in each chapter, where after they've extensively developed the subpart of the MIPS (be it the ISA, the ALU or Datapath & Control, the Pipeline and so on), they summarily look at how the same concepts have been developed by PowerPC and 80x86 or Pentium. All in all, if the book has been assigned as a textbook for a course, little integration is needed to understand it and made it useful for the course; or if it is used a self first introduction to computer architectures and especially RISC architecture, the book will prove a very good choice. And this happens simply because the transfer of knowledge is effective as probably the authors have intended it to be.
If what is needed is a reference, then perhaps the step-by-step approach would suggest other choices (e.g. Tanenbaum, Murdocca, Stallings or Mano & Kime).
Rating:
Summary: WELL EXPLAINED;
Review: This book is well explained and i do all the excersie, but i do not know if I am right or wrong, so could youlet me know where i can check the working .
Rating:
Summary: Great book; probably best as a textbook.
Review: This book kicks butt. It's got everything most programmers could
possibly want to know about how the machine underneath works, and more. It covers circuit logic, hardware arithmetic, how a processor works . . .
It answered all of my "I wonder how that happens in the machine" questions. However, I doubt you'd really want to read it unless you're in a
computer architecture class. I don't even mind the ridiculous price; it's
one of the few textbooks I feel is worth it.
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