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Comment by nikoisi | Hacker News Reader

Does anyone know a good resource at explaining what each of the components in the cpu diagrams does? For example what are the main functions and differences between rename/dispatch, reorder buffer, scheduler? chipandcheese does a very good job comparing architectures but sometimes I struggle to really understand the meaning of their diagrams.

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Maybe it's more than you want, but "Computer Architecture - A Quantitative Approach" from Hennessy and Patterson is a very good reference.

If your main interest is CPU cores even a relatively old version will be enough. From memory recent versions (5 and 6, 6 being the latest) have mostly added content on GPU and data center computing, but the sections on CPU architecture are rather stable.

I strongly recommend you to pick up H&P's Computer Organization and Design: the Hardware/Software Interface. I think you can really only appreciate their other great book, "A Quantitative Approach" if you properly learn a new architecture, then the big ideas behind "A Quantitative Approach" will really speak to you.

Organization and Design has different editions for RISC-V, aarch64 and MIPS. The MIPS one is what I learned computer architecture on and it's super solid.

you've got to pick up the basics of modern processor design (such as from H&P). without understanding basic pipelining, all the prediction, OoO, and superscalar stuff won't make any sense. and I think you probably need to try some asm programming for any of this to really click.

wikichip.org was good for me with explaining a lot of those low level functionality and how those improvements in new CPU work

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