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Comment by chm | Hacker News Reader

What reading do you recommend for someone who wants to learn about basic CPU design? I'm not a CS major, but I'm interested.

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Computer Systems: A Programmer's Perspective, Bryant & O'Halloran. http://www.amazon.com/dp/0136108040/ http://csapp.cs.cmu.edu/public/pieces/preface.pdf

This is a unique blend of operating systems and hardware architecture, emphasising application programming over the system implementation approach in Hennessy & Patterson.

A great book, whose only downside is using AT&T syntax.

The old standby, Computer Architecture: A Quantitative Approach, works you up through the basics.

Past the Patterson/Hennessy books, Shen/Lipasti's "Modern Processor Design" was really helpful to get a better sense of the implementation details of real chips, especially when you move past the 'conceptual' views (e.g. Tomasulo) and start to ask how instruction schedulers or renaming or load/store buffers actually work.

Hold on, don't you mean Computer Organization and Design, by the same authors? The one with these pages:

https://books.google.com/books?id=RXARim9cNBIC&pg=PA288&dq=b...

They're different books. "Computer Architecture: A Quantitative Approach" is an introduction to the subject for people who will work in the area. "Computer Organization and Design" is for people who need to understand how processors and hardware systems work in order to do their own work. (Mostly.)

The preface to "Organization and Design" says basically this. For what it's worth, "Computer Architecture" is sitting on my shelf, and that's what I used in grad school. But based on their preface, I may buy "Organization and Design" because it may be a better reference for what I do day-to-day.

Not as rigorous as an academic textbook, and unfortunately ends with Core 2, but "Inside the Machine" by Jon Stokes (Hannibal of Ars Technica) is a good overview.

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