Computer Organization & Design : The Hardware Software Interface by Hennessy and Patterson is a great book for any coder that is interested in how CPUs actually tick.
However I don’t think knowing the gorey details of transistors is necessary. What they need to be aware of is cache hierarchies and pipelined superscalar processor architecture.
These sophisticated architectural features can be flouted by code that causes them to behave poorly. Such as code that does random accesses in a large buffer causing the probability of the desired data being stored in cache to be low.
The ways in which real computers differ from idealized ones is what CS students need to know.
Also CS students ought to have to learn to read others’ code.
However I don’t think knowing the gorey details of transistors is necessary. What they need to be aware of is cache hierarchies and pipelined superscalar processor architecture.
These sophisticated architectural features can be flouted by code that causes them to behave poorly. Such as code that does random accesses in a large buffer causing the probability of the desired data being stored in cache to be low.
The ways in which real computers differ from idealized ones is what CS students need to know.
Also CS students ought to have to learn to read others’ code.