iv
In
Praise
of
Computer
Architecture:
A Quantitative
Approach
Fifth
Edition
"The 5th edition
of
Computer Architecture: A Quantitative Approach continues
the legacy, providing students
of
computer architecture with the most up-to-date
information on current computing platforms, and architectural insights
to
help
them design future systems. A highlight
of
the new edition is the significantly
revised chapter on
dat_?--level
parallelism, which demystifies GPU architectures
with clear explanations using traditional computer architecture
terminology."
-Krste
Asanovic, University
of
California, Berkeley
"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 under-
graduate degree and
it
remains one
of
my
most frequently referenced texts today.
When the fourth edition came out, there was so much new material that I needed
to
get it to stay current in the field. And,
as
I review the fifth edition, I realize that
Hennessy and
Patterson have done it again. The entire text is heavily updated and
Chapter 6 alone makes this new edition required reading for those wanting to
really understand cloud and warehouse scale-computing.
Only Hennessy and
Patterson have access to the insiders at Google, Amazon, Microsoft, and other
cloud computing and internet-scale application providers and there is no better
coverage
of
this important area anywhere in the industry."
-James
Hamilton, Amazon
Web
Services
"Hennessy and Patterson wrote the first edition
of
this book when graduate stu-
dents 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 emerg-
ing ideas that make this field so
exciting."
-James
Larus, Microsoft Research
"This new edition adds a superb new chapter on data-level parallelism in vector,
SIMD, and
GPU architectures. It explains key architecture concepts inside mass-
market
GPUs, maps them
to
traditional terms, and compares them with vector
and SIMD architectures. It's timely and relevant with the widespread shift
to
GPU parallel computing. Computer Architecture: A Quantitative Approach fur-
thers its string
of
firsts in presenting comprehensive architecture coverage
of
nificant new developments!"
-John
Nickolls, NVIDIA
