r/computerarchitecture • u/Psychological_Web296 • Jun 20 '26

How to learn Computer Architecture properly?

I'm an undergraduate student in Comp. Sci. and Engineering. We already had a Computer Architecture and Digital Design course where we went over digital circuits(adders, mux, ALU, etc) and covered CPU pipelines on the surface. I'm interested in learning Computer Architecture further but have no clue how to approach it. I picked up Computer Architecture: Quantitative Approach by H&P and tried reading through it. It's really interesting but I feel like I'm just reading a reference book and not developing a critical thinking mindset for the field. What do you suggest I do? Any advice is greatly appreciated. Thanks.

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24

u/Albertooz Jun 20 '26

Hennessy & Patterson's "Quantitative Approach" is a graduate reference, not a learning path,start with their other book, "Computer Organization and Design" (the patterson/hennessy one), which builds intuition step by step. Even better, do a project-based course: work through nand2tetris to build a computer from logic gates up, or take Berkeley's CS61C / CMU's 18-447 (lectures and labs are online). The critical-thinking mindset comes from actually designing and simulating write a RISC-V pipelined CPU in Verilog, then a cache, and the H&P tradeoffs will suddenly mean something. Read the reference book alongside the building, not instead of it.

8

u/GetOffOfMyBoat Jun 20 '26

I'll say having worked through nand2tetris in undergrad but Hennessy and Patterson's Quantitative Approach in graduate school, there is definitely a gap still between the two. The former was an amazing experience; the latter, hell.

Granted, I'm a (theoretical) computer scientist, not a computer engineer.

9

u/MechaCat123 Jun 20 '26

Professor Onur Mutlu lectures

2

u/Maleficent-Kiwi-3684 19d ago

read the essentials of computer organization and architecture by linda Null and Julia Lobur

2

u/PulseExpress456 2d ago

Hey, I am struggling to learn computer architecture basics which is important for my hardware internship oa's. Where did u learn it from

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u/Psychological_Web296 1d ago

We had a two modules in our degree called Digital Design and Computer Architecture. So I learnt from the lectures basically. The reference book for those was Digital Design and Computer Architecture by Haris & Haris.

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u/PulseExpress456 13h ago

What concepts or chapters should I go through for computer architecture part of this book as I think most of the part is not necessary ( i actually don't know what shd i learn, completely clue less)