John L. Hennessy Books

Computer Architecture: A Quantitative Approach, Sixth Edition has been considered essential reading by instructors, students and practitioners of computer design for over 20 years. The sixth edition of this classic textbook from Hennessy and Patterson, winners of the 2017 ACM A.M. Turing Award recognizing contributions of lasting and major technical importance to the computing field, is fully revised with the latest developments in processor and system architecture. The text now features examples from the RISC-V (RISC Five) instruction set architecture, a modern RISC instruction set developed and designed to be a free and openly adoptable standard. It also includes a new chapter on domain-specific architectures and an updated chapter on warehouse-scale computing that features the first public information on Google's newest WSC. True to its original mission of demystifying computer architecture, this edition continues the longstanding tradition of focusing on areas where the most exciting computing innovation is happening, while always keeping an emphasis on good engineering design.

The book delves into parallelism, offering comprehensive examples and content that focus on both hardware and software aspects. Each chapter features new sections on Domain Specific Architectures (DSA), enhancing the discussion. It emphasizes the "Eight Great Ideas" of computer architecture, which include strategies for improving performance through parallelism, pipelining, prediction, and design considerations like Moore's Law, memory hierarchy, abstraction, optimizing common cases, and ensuring dependability through redundancy.