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.

>>1

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

The assertion that avoiding rep on the x86 is universally good for performance is obviously bogus.

However, this benchmark comparison is futile because the textbook doesn't care to mention which CPU was used for the test. Sure rep movs on a Nehalem will be pretty fast but the authors could have been using a 386 for all you know. Also the text implies that their load/store code was manually unrolled; the sample code that was used for benchmarking is not.