Old Standard Textbook, Renewed
Back in university, one of my favourite courses was the one on microprocessor architecture. One of the reasons was that the lab sessions involved building logic circuits from TTL chips with lots of hand-assembled wiring (imagine debugging such a contraption). Another reason was the textbook, which explained a RISC processor architecture (MIPS) in great detail and with awesome didactics. This book was “The Patterson/Hennessy” (officially, it goes by the slightly longer and also a bit unwieldy title “Computer Organization & Design: The Hardware/Software Interface”).
This was the Nineties. Fast-forward 30 years to today, and we have a new and increasingly practical RISC architecture around: RISC-V. The good thing about this architecture is that it is an inherently open standard. No company owns the specification, anyone can (provided they have the means) produce RISC-V chips.
Guess what, that favourite book of mine got an upgrade too: there is a RISC-V edition! This means that students, when first venturing into this rather interesting territory, can learn the principles of CPU design on an open standard basis that is much less convoluted than certain architectures, and - unlike certain others - entirely royalty-free.
Makes me want to go to university again ...
Tags: the-nerdy-bit, hacking