What to Read

One the questions I often get from prospective students is: “as a newcomer into computer architecture, what should I read to help prepare me for research”. This post is my detailed answer to that question…

The truth is, textbooks don’t really cut it; or at least they aren’t enough. While they may be able to give a good, broad introduction to the field, they simultaneously tend not to go deep enough to build a robust understanding, or broad enough to expose the reader to the vast amount of current and prior work 1. Considering any fast moving field, they are quickly outdated, and the view of the world that they present can feel uninspiring.

Probably the “right thing to do” is to read as many papers as possible from the recent top architecture conferences, and this post is by no means recommending against doing that. However, understanding these at a deep level, as well as their implications for the field, is really challenging for a novice (especially if you don’t have a really solid understanding from a great introductory course). Its too easy to walk away from any architecture paper with the content-free takeaway of
“oh, this idea looks cool, it should work”. Also, and no offense to all authors of architecture papers, but the way that authors position their work in relation to the field does not always exhibit enough intellectual maturity to point out the flaws or negative tradeoffs that would help readers put the work in an appropriate context.

So what to do? In my opinion, a really good option is the short-form book (think thesis-length written-lectures), as exemplified by the Morgan Claypool Synthesis Lectures. Why do these tend to be better? First, they are written by people who are passionate about their sub-field, as there is practically no monetary or other reward for doing it2. Second, these books go in depth, but are byte-sized enough to not require a huge time commitment to read in their entirety. Third, they are short enough to be easily updatable – in fact, many of the lectures in this series have 2nd editions because so much had changed since when they were published even one decade earlier.

There’s a lot of lectures available now, and typically the way you’d want to read them is to pick up the one that sounds most like what you’re currently interested in learning about. That said, I strongly recommend the following books as general reading that any architect should be aware of.

  1. I also find textbooks quite dry. If you like, blame it on the limited attention span of today’s youth. 

  2. And I should know, because I wrote one