Can you give some examples and why/in what respect they are better than (David) Patterson's books? Or are those "better texts" the Ars Technica CPU reviews and manufacturer datasheets that you mentioned in the subsequent sentence?
I liked John Shen's Modern Processor Design and Noam Nisan's The Elements of Computing Systems.
The websites I mentioned have hobbyist-level details that are pretty interesting (but in general won't teach you much about things like concurrency hazards and branch prediction and so forth).
Can you give some examples and why/in what respect they are better than (David) Patterson's books? Or are those "better texts" the Ars Technica CPU reviews and manufacturer datasheets that you mentioned in the subsequent sentence?