Skimmed it. It seems to be a summary of the contents of a graduate level course in computer architecture - which I think is a good thing. If that's a topic you're unfamiliar with, this looks like a good place to start.
> It seems to be a summary of the contents of a graduate level course in computer architecture
Graduate level? It was in my second year 'computer architecture' class, except in much more grueling detail. But I was a CE major, so that's that... (however, I recall I had many SE's and EE's in that class too).
I was a computer science student in undergrad and grad school. None of the CS undergrad curriculums I was involved with (either as a student or as a TA) had this level of architecture for undergrad CS majors.
PH or HP? My intro course used Computer Organization and Design, and the senior course used Computer Architecture: A Quantitative Approach (both are by the same authors).
Wow, didn't even realize the two authors had written two books on the subject. I meant the former and hadn't realized the parent of my post meant the latter, having not read the title after seeing the authors' names. Whoops!
Yea, any good intro to architecture should cover all this. I haven't yet taken any grad level architecture, but I suspect grad level is mostly "how do we actually do this stuff" instead of "here's what we do"
In my architecture class, we didn't get to a lot of this stuff (sans the caching). However, everything we did cover we implemented via circuit simulation software. You'd be surprised at how tricky some of the stuff can be. Although controllers are really simply (at least, when you use microprogramming).
It was in my second year 'computer architecture' class, except in much more grueling detail.
How much more? There are quite a few topics here that weren't covered in my introductory architecture course (e.g. speculation, VLIW, register renaming), though they were in the senior-level one.
He means this is a summary of what they covered, and that the actual class simply spent a week or three on each subject. Obviously if you've got 3 weeks to talk about caches, you're going to learn more (details) about them than what can be written in a paragraph or two.
