The most beautiful thing we can experience is the mysterious. It is the source of all true art and science.
Albert Einstein, What I Believe, 1930
About This Book
We believe that learning in computer science and engineering should reflect the current state of the field, as well as introduce the principles that are shaping computing. We also feel that readers in every specialty of computing need to appreciate the organizational paradigms that determine the capabilities, performance, energy, and, ultimately, the success of computer systems.
Modern computer technology requires professionals of every computing specialty to understand both hardware and software. The interaction between hardware and software at a variety of levels also offers a framework for understanding the fundamentals of computing. Whether your primary interest is hardware or software, computer science or electrical engineering, the central ideas in computer organization and design are the same. Thus, our emphasis in this book is to show the relationship between hardware and software and to focus on the concepts that are the basis for current computers.
The recent switch from uniprocessor to multicore microprocessors confirmed the soundness of this perspective, given since the first edition. While programmers could ignore the advice and rely on computer architects, compiler writers, and silicon engineers to make their programs run faster or be more energy-efficient without change, that era is over. For programs to run faster, they must become parallel. While the goal of many researchers is to make it possible for programmers to be unaware of the underlying parallel nature of the hardware they are programming, it will take many years to realize this vision. Our view is that for at least the next decade, most programmers are going to have to understand the hardware/software interface if they want programs to run efficiently on parallel computers.
The audience for this book includes those with little experience in assembly language or logic design who need to understand basic computer organization as well as readers with backgrounds in assembly language and/or logic design who want to learn how to design a computer or understand how a system works and why it performs as it does.
About the Other Book
Some readers may be familiar with Computer Architecture: A Quantitative Approach, popularly known as Hennessy and Patterson. (This book in turn is often called Patterson and Hennessy.) Our motivation in writing the earlier book was to describe the principles of computer architecture using solid engineering fundamentals and quantitative cost/performance tradeoffs. We used an approach that combined examples and measurements, based on commercial systems, to create realistic design experiences. Our goal was to demonstrate that computer architecture could be learned using quantitative methodologies instead of a descriptive approach. It was intended for the serious computing professional who wanted a detailed understanding of computers.
A majority of the readers for this book do not plan to become computer architects. The performance and energy efficiency of future software systems will be dramatically affected, however, by how well software designers understand the basic hardware techniques at work in a system. Thus, compiler writers, operating system designers, database programmers, and most other software engineers need a firm grounding in the principles presented in this book. Similarly, hardware designers must understand clearly the effects of their work on software applications.
Thus, we knew that this book had to be much more than a subset of the material in Computer Architecture, and the material was extensively revised to match the different audience. We were so happy with the result that the subsequent editions of Computer Architecture were revised to remove most of the introductory material; hence, there is much less overlap today than with the first editions of both books.
Why RISC-V for This Edition?
The choice of instruction set architecture is