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From the Book:

I am very lucky to have studied computer architecture under Prof. David Patterson at U.C. Berkeley more than 20 years ago. I enjoyed the courses I took from him, in the early days of RISC architecture. Since leaving Berkeley to help found Sun Microsystems, I have used the ideas from his courses and many more that are described in this important book.

The good news today is that this book covers incredibly important and contemporary material. The further good news is that much exciting and challenging work remains to be done, and that working from Computer Architecture: A Quantitative Approach is a great way to start.

The most successful architectural projects that I have been involved in have always started from simple ideas, with advantages explainable using simple numerical models derived from hunches and rules of thumb. The continuing rapid advances in computing technology and new applications ensure that we will need new similarly simple models to understand what is possible in the future, and that new classes of applications will stress systems in different and interesting ways.

The quantitative approach introduced in Chapter 1 is essential to understanding these issues. In particular, we expect to see, in the near future, much more emphasis on minimizing power to meet the demands of a given application, across all sizes of systems; much remains to be learned in this area.

I have worked with many different instruction sets in my career. I first programmed a PDP-8, whose instruction set was so simple that a friend easily learned to disassemble programs just by glancing at the hole punches in paper tape! I wrote a lot of code in PDP-11 assembler, including an interpreter for the Pascal programming language and for the VAX (which was used as an example in the first edition of this book); the success of the VAX led to the widespread use of UNIX on the early Internet.