Great Ideas in Computer Architecture¶
By Lisa Yan and countless semesters of CS 61C instructors. Last developed in Spring 2026.
This is the textbook for the Great Ideas in Computer Architecture class at UC Berkeley.
These course notes cover the content you need to know from lecture. You can use them as reference as you go through the course assignments.
Come to lecture and get the high-level idea. Then, read these course notes. Alternatively, skim course notes first, then come to lecture and ask questions.
Before attending discussion section, try the precheck exercises. Solutions are provided.
As of Spring 2026, these course notes are in active development. If you find an error in our first draft, please email cs61c@ or submit a pull request on GitHub.
Course notes are based on the following textbooks:¶
P&H: Computer Organization and Design RISC-V Edition: The Hardware Software Interface, Second Edition. David A. Patterson and John L. Hennessy. ISBN 0128203315.
K&R: The C Programming Language, Second Edition by Kernighan and Ritchie.
WSC: The Datacenter as a Computer: An Introduction to the Design of Warehouse-Scale Machines. Luiz André Barroso, Jimmy Clidaras, Urs Hölzle. Morgan & Claypool Publishers. 2013
License¶
The contents of this book are licensed for free consumption under the following license: Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International (CC BY-NC-ND 4.0)
Acknowledgments¶
Our deepest gratitude goes to many, many faculty and teaching assistants who contributed to CS 61C lecture materials over the years. Special thanks to CS 61C Fall 2020 instructors Dan Garcia and Bora Nikolic for recording the high-quality set of videos used to build these notes. The videos are linked where possible.