Hennessy and Patterson

Ostensibly one of the most widely used books for studying computer architecture so I had a look, and... WTF? Possible future CPU designers are being fed with tripe like this?

http://i62.tinypic.com/xakqr.png

Despite all the focus on MIPS and performance, it is suspiciously missing any real benchmarks of MIPS processors.

They have an interesting definition of a "desktop computer":
http://i60.tinypic.com/4lq2j7.png

"Heineken and Pilsner" would be a better name for this book, as its authors appear to be as knowledgeable about real-world computer architecture as drunken fools.

>>19

Interestingly, using SSE2 non-temporal moves maintains the same speed regardless of size (not surprising since it bypasses the cache), and with huge sizes is the fastest by <10% again, but that's a bit like cheating in that the difference quickly vanishes if we need to access the data that was copied (very common situation) - the cache misses that were avoided during the copy just appear later.

To be fair it's also possible you'd not need to access the data that was just copied (I think framebuffers are the canonical example, but hardware with high bandwidth requirements and no DMA engine is sort of uncommon these days).