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Chip design is SUCH an advanced topic. It's potentially one of the most advanced human disciplines at the moment.

I have a friend[0] that is doing his Electronics Engineering masters in Germany (very prestigious engineering university) and they're studying a freaking Pentium 4. Even for them the cutting edge chip design is black magic.

[0] Ultimate frisbee teammate.

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Question: there's a lot of hands-on learning resources on the construction of a simple microcoded processor, or an in-order pipelined processor where the most headache-inducing thing you have to deal with is forwarding results – but is there one on the essential elements of "modern" superscalar OoO, e.g. the circuits that check for hazards and delay dispatching etc.?

It's not that it's magic I would love to learn about: it's that I'd like to know what happens behind the scenes when we say that (for example) "results get reordered in the reorder buffer"!

Is Hennessy and Patterson still the main book used in universities?

A list + links would be much appreciated!

Replying for a reminder to check later.

Might enjoy this video, though it's a bit basic: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=NGFhc8R_uO4

I used this last semester for Masters level computer hardware course.

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