Oh, oh, oh. I can answer this — I’m a software engineer on sabbatical and I’m doing the same. First off, everyone says Hennessey & Patterson and Patterson & He

Oh, oh, oh. I can answer this — I’m a software engineer on sabbatical and I’m doing the same. First off, everyone says Hennessey & Patterson and Patterson & Hennessey and while I think those books are worth reading at some point, for me they concentrate on things that I don’t care about (like what the cutting edge is) and gloss over the finer details of actually how the processor works. I’ve found that Mano’s Computer System Architecture is great for the higher level stuff. I have the 2nd edition from 1982. I like Hauck and DeHon’s Reconfigurable Computing from 2007 for FPGAs. I like Hill and Peterson’s Digital Systems: Hardware Organization and Design from 1973 for describing the design programmatically using an RTL, in this case they use an APL derivative rather than the more recent (and horrible) VHDL or Verilog. This is a dense text and I’m still working my way through but it’s super awesome in my opinion. I’ve been working through the Visual ARM1 animated transistor-level simulator and have made my way to Bryant’s 1984 paper A Switch-Level Model and Simulator for MOS Digital Systems and recursively reading what I need to understand it thoroughly. I have Mead & Conway on the way. I also have a copy of Sedra & Smith (2nd Edition) for understanding the actual electrical circuits but I rarely reference it.