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.

>>49
"Wasteful" depends on what you are trying to accomplish. If you have a large installed base of software that can't be re-compiled, adding compatibility features to your hardware starts making more sense.

One thing you may notice is that vendors with complex instruction sets like Intel's don't like to sell small, low cost chips where instruction decode begins to occupy a significant share of the die. They'd much rather sell you an expensive, high transistor count design where the area used by decode is totally dominated by caches, etc.