41–50 of 78 posts
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> Nearly failed that class I did fail it in university. Took it again and got an A-, and now love working with assembly and computer architecture.
The struggle make your knowledge crystallize even better, on top of overcoming the failure. I almost wish anyone to fail one important class in university.
I always find computer architecture a strange/tricky topic to cover in a tech book, its either too vague, or too specific, often forgetting about using the right tool for the job. From the index, this looks like the latter but if I get a chance I'll check it out. The only one I've found so far that hit the right notes for me personally was Software Architecture Patterns (9781098134273), Mark Richards. This topic list…
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Isn’t this technically true though? Fractions are just rational reals. The examples listed are still reals, just irrational.
It's bad pedagogy. But it is also technically incorrect. You can have fractions with complex numbers.
Also, I bet the authors weren’t intentionally trying to lead readers astray with that statement. Most books have a preface with some point of contact if you find errors. I’m sure if you wrote in the authors would be happy to fix this up :)
Better option: Computer Organization and Design by Patterson and Hennessy, ISBN 978-0124077263. Comes in MIPS (original version now in its 5th edition), ARM and RISC-V focused flavors, covers "instructions unique to architecture X" as part of its discussion.
I had no idea they did RISC-V and ARM versions! Very cool. This was the book for the "weed-out" class I took my first semester in college. Nearly failed that class, but it opened my eyes to so much more of computing, beyond just "coding".
Better option: Computer Organization and Design by Patterson and Hennessy, ISBN 978-0124077263. Comes in MIPS (original version now in its 5th edition), ARM and RISC-V focused flavors, covers "instructions unique to architecture X" as part of its discussion.
They're not flavors, they're editions. They have changed their ISA over time.
The current edition uses RISC-V.
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I had no idea they did RISC-V and ARM versions! Very cool. This was the book for the "weed-out" class I took my first semester in college. Nearly failed that class, but it opened my eyes to so much more of computing, beyond just "coding".
Does anyone have an idea how bad is the ARM version? The reviews online say they did not fully adapt it from MIPS, and that the instruction set is partially made up instead of using the real one, which means listings won't work on real hardware.
They will. LEG is a subset of ARM. What won't work is ARM software on LEG hardware.
I would recommend getting the current edition, which has replaced ARM/LEG with the industry standard RISC-V.
Better option: Computer Organization and Design by Patterson and Hennessy, ISBN 978-0124077263. Comes in MIPS (original version now in its 5th edition), ARM and RISC-V focused flavors, covers "instructions unique to architecture X" as part of its discussion.
Overall I enjoyed this book. However their opening paragraph to floating point numbers is offensive. "programming languages support numbers with fractions, which are called reals in mathematics. Here are some examples of reals: 3.14159265... (pi) 2.71828... (e)" >fractions are called reals in mathematics >immediately gives pi and e as an example
I would also use "real number" instead of "real", but that may be more of a stylistic choice rather than idiomatic.
If you're interested in ARM and hardware design, "Digital Design and Computer Architecture: ARM Edition" by Sarah Harris and David Harris is available in the ACM Digital Library as a free PDF: https://dl.acm.org/doi/book/10.5555/2815529
Better link?: https://github.com/PacktPublishing/Modern-Computer-Architect...
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Overall I enjoyed this book. However their opening paragraph to floating point numbers is offensive. "programming languages support numbers with fractions, which are called reals in mathematics. Here are some examples of reals: 3.14159265... (pi) 2.71828... (e)" >fractions are called reals in mathematics >immediately gives pi and e as an example
Isn’t this technically true though? Fractions are just rational reals. The examples listed are still reals, just irrational.