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Comment by GregarianChild | Hacker News Reader

The 5th edition is seriously out of date. The last 15 years or so have seen massive changes in computer architecture, in particular the explosion of all manner of hardware accelerators, including modern GPUs.

The 7th edition is supposed to come out on 1 January 2025.

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It's a gift horse, and you say it needs dental work? ;-)

I think most of the essentials remain true today. As for hardware accelerators, they're all some variation of SIMD or an ASIC built to run a specific algorithm.

Von Neumann stuck us with the program counter, and all the waiting that comes along with it. It's almost impossible to walk away from his legacy.

> Von Neumann stuck us with the program counter

As opposed to what? A stack of program counters? A set of registers containing program counters? Von Neumann seems related to this as much as the fact that you can only beat one person with a single stick.

Look at tagged token architecture - no program counter required.

It's actually bad news for students when expensive textbooks get updated who go to classes with assignments based on a specific edition and their indices get reshuffled and the old editions become useless even though the core stuff which are unchanged are really the only relevant subset to the syllabus.

> seriously

How seriously though? Also, the priniples behind GPUs and their use - unlike maybe their physical realization - have not changed much since 2011. (See Chapter 4.)

> The last 15 years or so have seen massive changes in computer architecture, in particular the explosion of all manner of hardware accelerators, including modern GPUs.

What mechanics would you like the eighth edition to introduce?

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