Rating: 
Summary: An excellent book, now updated
Review: An excellent work, providing an in-depth coverage of microprocessor and computer systems architecture and implementation (without concentrationg on Intel IA-32, for a change)
This is not an introductory text - it assumes you have already got some basic knowledge in computer architecture, and it takes you much further.
Besides being a great textbook, this book is extremely useful when one is dealing with low-level optimizations.
Rating: 
Summary: Lots of Details with Little Explanation
Review: As others have stated, this book is full of advanced computer architecture concepts, details, and real-world case studies.However, while using this book in a class, I have come to realize how poor of a job it does at explaining said topics. I almost gave this 2 stars for an educational text, but for overall use I gave it 3. The examples in the book give the answer immediately and provide hardly any explanation as to the answer. The most explanatory portions of the text are figures, which you have to reason through with little help. An analogy to an example in this text is this: Problem:
"Addition is the sum of two numbers. As an example, add 3 + 3." Solution:
"3 + 3 = 6. Hence, addition is a useful operation and we'll use it from now on." This is slightly exaggerated, but is not much different from how this book treats topics that a student needs explained. I congratulate the authors on their knowledge and credentials, but they need to do a better job at instructing their readers.
Rating:
Summary: good for calculations
Review: But not so for coverage of computer architecture as a subject.
Has good chapters on memory organization.
Rating:
Summary: The milestone and its third edition
Review: First, this is certainly not an introductory text on Computer Architectures. The authors assume that people reading it have already had an introductory class or some experience. Simply put, the book is not intended to explain how cache memory works, but to present a thourough quantitative analysis to show why and when one implementation works better than another, and what improvements have been devised recently to speed this or this other measurement.
Of course, the best choice for this book would be to have it preceeded by "Computer Organization: the HW/SW interface" (aka CO-HSI), by the same authors, since it would help to better comprehend the MIPS64 and the low-level design behind it, since CO-HSI develop an older version of the MIPS itself. This is for sure one of the most informative books I've ever encountered both as a student and as a SW engineer. It contains an overwhelming quantity of data, tips, warnings, tecniques so that the over 1100 pages seem incredibly dense. And don't be fooled the book is "only so little": there are other seven online appendixes that can be downloaded, that will add up to more than 250 pages to the book.
As experience teaches, however, quantity does not always mean quality. Yet, it seems this doesn't apply to this book, because the quality of its content is highly informative and interesting for those involved with true CA designs. Since the first chapter it's clear that target of the book is not a survery of CAs, but a guide through the bunch of considerations and problems a design of a new CA must cope with today. I mean today because much of the data collected and presented is binded to (and updated to) the current edition and its realease date. So covered CAs for this 3ed will feature IA-64 or Sony Playstation II among the others. Nonetheless, it would be misleading to think that next year the book will become useless. Most of the considerations the authors develop and present are quite long lasting (the usage patterns of ISAs, e.g., have incurred little change since the second edition, six years ago). This edition presents noticeable changes, even if there's no doubt the core is that of CA-AQA 2ed. To mention a few, the first chapter is of course almost totally new since it's the most time-bounded of the book. The elder chapter four (Advanced Pipelining and Instruction Level Parallellism) has been expanded into two chapters, one dealing with Hardware approaches and one with Software approaches (and both with hybrid ones). This goes into great benefit for the reader since it seems we never get enough details on modern CAs and their complexity otherwise.
However, changes has been done even in the way of reductions, and that's especially true for the elder chapter three (Pipelining). It was a full 100 pages chapter, featuring an astonishing treatment of the topic, that has been fundamental in my class of CA II. In the 3ed edition, this chapter has been moved to a shorter appendix at the end, and I think this appendix can't compare with its predecessor (even if some of the "cut" topics have been then spread through chapters 3-4 in the 3ed). About the exposition of the topics, the authors have built a solid way to make things clear for students and not, beginners and not on quantitative analysis. The book is full of figures, graph, citation and feature a wide bibliography at the end of the book and a reasoned set of references at the end of each chapter. The only difficulties reading this book will arise only because of the complexity of the topics, who themselves require a fair amount of attention, not because of the language which keeps always clear and straightforward. This said, I think the book is a fully deserved 5 stars one, with no concurrents on its kind, scope and utility. That's probabily why it has been worlwide used since its first edition.
Rating: 
Summary: A Thick Book
Review: Good collection of recent microprocessor
technologies. A good approach in
quantification of computer design. However,
does the exciting field of computer architecure
justify the sheer number of words in
the book? The book would be a better pedagogical tool
if it is less wordy, more precise and in depth
(such as in clearer explanation of Scheduling
Branch Delay Slot, etc.) Overall a good solid text. Atoon
Rating: 
Summary: Horrible book
Review: I have to say that this is the worst textbook I have ever used. It makes no sense! I would work on assigned problems from the book and I would spend more time trying to figure out what the question was asking for than I did actually working on the problem. And the text is no help when you are trying to figure out what to do as there are few if any examples. Frequently when trying to read their explanations of things I would find myself wondering what the heck they were talking about. I would not recommend this book for anyone who dislikes being confused and frustrated.
Rating:
Summary: Interesting book !!
Review: I think it is a better book than 2 edition, the authors have included the latest important stuff removing the arcane concepts like how adder work, addressing mode etc. I really enjoyed reading this book, appendix chapters really help me to brush up my basic concepts. However this book doesn't completely explains the concept of benchmarking machines -- what useful information can be drawn out of those tables.
Rating: 
Summary: Too much, too little
Review: It's ironic that I have a 1000 word review limit here, but the authors of this book couldn't make themselves stop after the first 1136 official pages of this book. No, online appendices add yet another 250 pages! The book is littered with examples with calculation errors, or cryptic examples such as the description of time-constrained scaling on p. 621: "the ideal running time is the same, 1 hour, so the problem size is cube root of 10 times n." Excuse me, some explanation or, better yet, proofreading, are in order here. In the same chapter, on p. 557, we have to wade through tables of state changes, only to find numerous variants of FSM representations of the same material on subsequent pages. No wonder this volume is so big! Lack of proofreading, revisions or excisions, and years of accretion has made this a nasty book to use for an advanced course. It's so big, students can't carry it to class. It's so big, even professors of graduate computer science courses comment on how unfocused it's become. It's so big, there should be fat mama jokes about it. It may be the only thing of its kind out there, but it's only worth 2 stars in its present state.
Rating:
Summary: Popular but difficult to use
Review: Nearly every CS or ECE department is US uses this as their textbook, because the authors are the most experienced researcher in this field. The book has plenty of descriptions but it lacks examples and explanations. What's more, you can never understand accurately what the authors mean in the exercises. They just assume that you know everything about the background knowledge. This semester we spent most of the time to clarify the doubts about the exercises in this course. So I suggest to use another book if you can.
Rating:
Summary: comprehensive, but goes around in circles
Review: Some chapters are easy to read, but some just don't have enough examples. I found myself stumped many times trying to attempt the exercises and finding the info that I was missing on the internet.
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