I'm a software engineer and I'd like to learn more about the hardware I work with. Are there any seminal volumes that really do a good job of walking an advanced computer user through how computers and microprocessors actually work?<p>How do processors actually do computations? What goes into designing a chip? What's clock speed actually mean? What are the different kinds of RAM and what are the tradeoffs?<p>Is there an equivalent of The Art of Computer Programming in the hardware world?
For an intro read, Hennessy and Patterson's "Computer Organization and Design" is good. Their other book, "Computer Architecture: A Quantitative Approach" is the de facto bible, but it's slightly more advanced, and not a good first read. Another good intro book is "Computer Systems: A Programmer's Perspective" - especially for software people.