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Comment by sanderjd | Hacker News Reader

I had no idea they did RISC-V and ARM versions! Very cool.

This was the book for the "weed-out" class I took my first semester in college. Nearly failed that class, but it opened my eyes to so much more of computing, beyond just "coding".

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> Nearly failed that class

I did fail it in university. Took it again and got an A-, and now love working with assembly and computer architecture.

The struggle make your knowledge crystallize even better, on top of overcoming the failure. I almost wish anyone to fail one important class in university.

I deeply regret the courses I barely passed. And the courses for which I had prior knowledge to pass comfortably but not engage on the nuances.

That was me with a high performance scientific computing class.

Does anyone have an idea how bad is the ARM version? The reviews online say they did not fully adapt it from MIPS, and that the instruction set is partially made up instead of using the real one, which means listings won't work on real hardware.

>which means listings won't work on real hardware.

They will. LEG is a subset of ARM. What won't work is ARM software on LEG hardware.

I would recommend getting the current edition, which has replaced ARM/LEG with the industry standard RISC-V.

Does RISC-V version include GPU?

I am more inclined for ARM version since that's applicable to both all current Apple hardware and school Chromebooks.

The ISA doesn't really matter (at least, not between MIPS, ARMv8, and RISC-V) when you're first diving into computer organisation. That's why one book can be sold with three different ISAs. The overarching concepts are mostly the same: you have digital logic, IEEE-754, basic assembly (add, sub, and, not, xor, load, store, shift), pipelining and hazards, caches.

Only afterwards do the differences between the ISAs come to play, when you have complex vector and ISA-specific instructions, superscalar pipelines, atomic instructions, etc.

It matters for engagement, e.g. if you can actually run examples painlessly.

The open standard ISA RISC-V has the advantage there, with open source hardware implementations (like C906 and C910) and good tooling and simulators.

RISC-V is rapidly building the strongest ecosystem.

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