“Although important concepts of architecture are timeless, this edition has been thoroughly updated with the latest technology developments, costs, examples, and references. Keeping pace with recent developments in open-sourced architecture, the instruction set architecture used in the book has been updated to use the RISC-V ISA.”
from the foreword by Norman P. Jouppi, Google
“Computer Architecture: A Quantitative Approach is a classic that, like fine wine, just keeps getting better. I bought my first copy as I finished up my undergraduate degree and it remains one of my most frequently referenced texts today.”
James Hamilton, Amazon Web Service
“Hennessy and Patterson wrote the first edition of this book when graduate students built computers with 50,000 transistors. Today, warehouse-size computers contain that many servers, each consisting of dozens of independent processors and billions of transistors. The evolution of computer architecture has been rapid and relentless, but Computer Architecture: A Quantitative Approach has kept pace, with each edition accurately explaining and analyzing the important emerging ideas that make this field so exciting.”
James Larus, Microsoft Research
“Another timely and relevant update to a classic, once again also serving as a window into the relentless and exciting evolution of computer architecture! The new discussions in this edition on the slowing of Moore's law and implications for future systems are must-reads for both computer architects and practitioners working on broader systems.”
Parthasarathy (Partha) Ranganathan, Google
“I love the ‘Quantitative Approach’ books because they are written by engineers, for engineers. John Hennessy and Dave Patterson show the limits imposed by mathematics and the possibilities enabled by materials science. Then they teach through real-world examples how architects analyze, measure, and compromise to build working systems. This sixth edition comes at a critical time: Moore’s Law is fading just as deep learning demands unprecedented compute cycles. The new chapter on domain-specific architectures documents a number of promising approaches and prophesies a rebirth in computer architecture. Like the scholars of the European Renaissance, computer architects must understand our own history, and then combine the lessons of that history with new techniques to remake the world.”
Cliff Young, Google