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.

>>37

stupid design decisions like defaulting to big-endian

You'd think that people who favor minimalist designs would realize how dumb this is.

It took ARM seven revisions to add an integer divide, and it's still considered "optional". Maybe this is OK for small embedded cores but it's absolutely idiotic for something intended to do more computation and be general-purpose.

The flip side of this is ARM was able to get away with doing absolutely nothing for seven generations and their embedded cores remain free from the requirement to retain a crappy divide unit that no one will use anyway. Meanwhile x86 had to keep same around for years and can never be rid of it, even in embedded use cases where they might really want to. Adding slow instructions because you think future generations will be able to do things faster is a bet Intel didn't always win (see: almost every instruction that was added for the 286).