Hennessy and Patterson wrote the first edition of this book when graduate students
built computers with 50,000 transistors. Today, warehouse-size computers
contain that many servers, each consisting of dozens of independent processors
and billions of transistors. The evolution of computer architecture has been rapid
and relentless, but Computer Architecture: A Quantitative Approach has kept pace,
with each edition accurately explaining and analyzing the important emerging
ideas that make this field so exciting.
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