general

Some may wonder why so many teachers, in Universities, Colleges and elsewhere, have selected this textbook among so many other choices.

First, this book presents an authoritative introduction on a popular type of architecture: the MIPS architecture. As the basis for the Pentium class of systems, one can hardly avoid a good coverage of MIPS in a Computer Architecture and Design class. Secondly, the authors have taken great pains to indicate common fallacies and pitfalls as well as "real-world" examples (even though they may be slightly outdated since the writing of this book in 1995). Thirdly the book is fairly comprehensive in breadth, if not always in depth.

This brings us to the real reason this textbook enjoys popularity among teachers: flexibility. Teachers often use a textbook not as a reference, but as an aide in teaching. Usually this means that the exercises, presentation and diagrams are helpful in covering a particular topic. Patterson and Hennessy provide the essentials of MIPS architecture while leaving enough room for teachers to use their own methods of presentation and emphasis. Since the book makes use of logic design but does not require it as a prerequisite (while giving a very good high-level overview in Appendix B), students from a variety of background (hardware or software) can make use of this book without being held back. A teacher may choose to cover logic design in parallel, or seperately, put more emphasis on pipelining or glossing over it, and either offer an extensive coverage of MIPS assembly or ignore it altogether This effectively allows for a wide berth in teaching possibilities.

What's in it for the student? Pay careful attention to your teacher's lecture! (But you know this already) Use this book for its excellent diagrams and for its explanations if you need to understand a particular concept in more details. Use it to do the exercises of course. In the rare event that you understood completely the lecture the first time, do not hesitate to skip ahead to find "Final" diagrams and summary tables.

A note on P&H's incremental method: while it may initially present some difficulty for a reader accustomed to receiving ready-made answers, it is an excellent way of understanding the design process which is inherently incremental in scope and functionality. When studying a series of diagrams (such as 5.19-5.24 or 6.31-6.35), visualize the intermediary figures as stills of a picture. The entire sequence of figures may be played in "fast-forward" to see the evolution of a design or the activities along the instruction datapath. The last figure in such a sequence may then better understood and appreciated.

Last but not least, do not hesitate to read and consult other references such as Tanenbaum's Structured Computer Organization, MIPS reference docs available online and MIPS design companies websites. Do not forget what a Computer Architecture and Design class is all about: learning to design your own architecture one day in the real world!

This book is one of the standard textbooks for Computer Organization. However the approach of instruction taken by the authors is unconventional, and a reader might or might not find it useful. Here are the points that will be useful to prospective buyers: 1. If this book was ASSIGNED as a course requirement, have no fear. With a good instructor in class as your primary source, the book is fairly easy to understand. Besides, the exercises are well ranked in order of difficulty, and sufficiently varied across levels of difficulty. And they are usually interesting. 2. If you wish to use this as a reference work, be warned. The style is strange, and upside down in places. For example, "examples" are given with wrong usage of Assembly "instructions", because the book has not "got there yet". Later, you are given the "correct version". Some people might like this, some may not. 3. If you are a professional and want a refresher, be warned again. The book labours through pages and pages of simple worked exercises, involving nothing more complicated than a times b divided by c, and then jumps into implementational details. 4. One thing the book must be praised for is its thoroughness. 5. Essentially, the authors have intended that ANYONE not even remotely familiar with the subject should be able to tackle it from the ground up. Thus you have concepts introduced in an EXTREMELY step by step fashion, and no one will complain that the book is "difficult to read", per se. But the authors carry it a little too far, and those readers used to traditional textbook techniques of explanation, will be lost in many places. Those who have no problems with this might complain that the book is too long in places. The most satisfied reader will be one who has no idea of what computers are, and was thrown into this course all of a sudden, and who has a lot of free time, and who has an instructor to guide him through the book and the course.

This book has a good potential in teaching students about computer organization. Unfortunately, the authors spend too much time explaining simple concepts which makes the book very boring and tedious to read. For example: the authors spend 335 pages just to explain basic MIPS assembly languages and computer performance. Those concepts could have been explained in 50 pages at most. Giving too much unnecessary detail won't help me to get a better understanding of computer organization. In fact, I get lost because the main topic was buried inside all the unimportant unnecessary details. This book could have been written in 300 pages, which is about a third of the length of the book, and still gives a clear, to the point, concise explanation of computer organization.