I am honored to write the foreword for Chandra Thimmannagari's book on CPU design. Chandra's book provides a practical overview of Microprocessor and high end ASIC design as practiced today. It is a valuable addition to the literature on CPU design, and is made possible by Chandra's unique combination of extensive hands-on CPU design experience at companies such as AMD and Sun Microsystems and a passion for writing. Technical books related to CPU design are almost always written by researchers in academia or industry and tend to pick one area, CPU architecture/Bus architecture/ CMOS design...