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.

>>31

This is why CISC has so much potential. Complex instructions don't get slower, they get faster over time and give hardware designers more room to optimise with each new microarchitecture and make existing software faster. RISC is a dumb, overly simplistic, and ridiculously shortsighted design decision by people who don't understand the laws of physics.

RISC benefits from the same hardware advances that CISC does. The x86 benefits more because it was further behind to start with. Historic RISC designs have been able to defer implementing features that the x86 had earlier but that's not really a strong argument for the x86 per se.