Computer Organization and Design RISC-V - Key Takeaways

in Books
#computer-architecture #risc-v

Dates Read: 09/04/2025 - 10/17/2025

Rating: 4/5

When I was at Cal Poly SLO, my computer architecture course used the MIPS version of this book. The reason I switched to the RISC-V edition was because the rest of my computer engineering courses used RISC-V.

It's a great book, but you really miss out if you're not doing the exercises or even touching some SystemVerilog along the way (though the book doesn't really mention or stress Verilog exercises).

It's a great introduction to tying assembly code and its instructions to the physical hardware inside our PCs, although the examples are often explained using smaller personal computers rather than large-scale servers in data centers.

It still teaches fundamental concepts like Amdahl's Law, 5-stage pipelines, memory hierarchy, and instruction set architecture (ISA).

The later chapters do touch upon parallelism since most of the world has moved toward multithreaded and multiprocessing approaches, but the coverage is not as complete as in their follow-up book, Computer Architecture: A Quantitative Approach.

What I appreciate more about this book compared to Computer Architecture: A Quantitative Approach is how simply the concepts are explained since this is an introductory textbook.