The authors of the prescribed book have an interesting interview on the ACM Queue site.
They cover issues like how they wrote their first book (the more advanced book recommended reading for this course) and what multicore designs mean in practice.
If you are interested in computer architecture research and following up more detail here are some places to look:
- WWW Computer Architecture Page
- Wikipedia – always a good starting point, but go to primary references rather than citing this as anyone can edit it and you may hit it on a bad day:
- IBM’s Cell project
- the University of Michigan M5 complete-system simulator
- David Goldberg. What Every Computer Scientist Should Know About Floating-Point Arithmetic, Computing Surveys, vol. 23 no. 1 March, 1991, pp 5 - 48
- Some tools for hardware performance measurement
- CacheKit
- Mac OS X performance tools
- PmcTools for FreeBSD
- further PMC reading
Here’s an interesting article published on 1 April 2006.