Disappointing...

I was hoping to find an alternative to Patterson et al.'s "Computer Organization and Design" -- mainly to get away from their constant and not-very-subtle "MIPS is better than x86" diatribe.

This book loses one star for bad editing.

It loses another star for being (in places) just plain wrong about details. The authors seem to do fine with "big picture" generalizations, but when it comes to the particulars -- watch out! This problem seems most obvious when they try to talk about the features of real-world CPUs, such as the x86 family. For example, they made a couple statements about Pentium memory management that left me wondering if they had ever read the Intel documentation. In general, their real-world examples seemed to be something that they stuck into the book in order to make it "more relevant."

So, I guess it's back to Patterson, et al.

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