Computer Architecture: A Quantitative Approach

Computer Architecture: A Quantitative Approach by John L. Hennessy and David A. Patterson is a textbook on how computers are designed and evaluated; the sixth edition appeared in 2017. The authors teach architects to measure performance, cost and energy rather than rely on intuition, covering instruction sets, memory hierarchies, pipelining, parallelism, GPUs and warehouse-scale computers. The sixth edition uses the open RISC-V instruction set in its examples and adds a chapter on domain-specific architectures, such as chips built for machine learning, with case studies and exercises throughout.

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Jensen Huang: “the book that made a huge impact on me was computer architecture from Hennessy and Patterson, a quantitative approach”