Rating: 
Summary: Comprehensive text, solid examples
Review: This hefty tome (883 pages plus appendices) is now in its 3rd edition, and still remains possibly the standard text in its genre.Seeing this book brought back memories of second-year Computer Science 11 years ago where I learned the comparative virtues of the now-gone VAX computer's massively complex instruction set compared to the sleek RISC SPARC processor and its optimisation opportunities through pipelining a machine instruction's execution stages. If the above makes no sense to you, or you'd rather not be bogged down with the mathematics of predicting branching when caching, then perhaps this is not the book for you. In fact, it's hard to imagine any casual hobbyist or home user or even the bulk of IT professionals finding much to suit their needs (let alone comprehend!), except in an academic capacity. Don't get me wrong though - that's not to say this book is valueless, and the truth is far from it. Those who persevere will be rewarded with precise and in-depth technical discussion of modern processor designs - including the Sony PlayStation 2, the cluster that runs the Google search engine, advanced topics in multithreading, instruction-level parallelism, analysis of capacity, costs and performance of disks over two decades and so much more. Undoubtedly, the book is highly specialised and simply will not appeal to the majority of readers, but with equal certainty it is still surely one of the leading texts in its field, retaining relevance with this updated 3rd edition. If you aspire to become a leading scientist at Intel or AMD then this book is a must. Oh - and future students beware - chapters still conclude with exercises, but still only a handful actually have solutions presented, hence making all the others possible candidates for assignment questions!
Rating:
Summary: Awesome Text
Review: This is by far the best text for a second course in computer architecture. It is an advanced book, so I don't recommend it for as a text for a first course in comp. arch. For a first course, refer to the text by the same authors titled Computer Organization and Design: A hardware/software Interface.
In any case, this text is one of the best text I've seen. (And I have seen lots of computer books, from compiler design to VLSI design) If you're interested in how hardware works, get this book!
Rating: 
Summary: Explanations are unnecessarily complicated
Review: While this is a comprehensive book for some one trying to understand the design philosophies in Comp. Architecture I notice the following problems
* A lot of simple concepts are explained in a complex cryptic manner. May be the authors try to pour in all their academic experience on the subject in to each paragraph.
* A lot of errors in examples..( atleast in the old edition)
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