Nice that there's both MIPS and RISC-V versions of the book:

https://www.amazon.com/Computer-Organization-Design-MIPS-Arc...

https://www.amazon.com/Computer-Organization-Design-RISC-V-A...

I guess as of today we know which one to get.

I remember doing MIPS assembler in the computer hardware class in college. We used the book "Computer Organization and Design: The Hardware/Software Interface" (aka "Patterson and Hennessy") [1]. At the time it was an enlightening experience because until then I hadn't fully internalized how computers were implemented at the hardware level.

[1] http://www.amazon.com/Computer-Organization-Design-Fifth-Arc...

Me and a group of friends at NTNU spent the last three months implementing self-designed and working GPU from scratch in VHDL on a Xilinx Spartan 6 FPGA. At the same time as this, we also implemented fully working multi-cycle and pipelined MIPS CPUs for the same FPGA.

All of us came from software backgrounds, never having touched any hardware description language.

To get started I'd recommend reading Computer organization and design by Patterson and Hennessy (http://www.amazon.com/Computer-Organization-Design-Fifth-Edi...).

For the VHDL part, all we had available was this small basic VHDL compendium (not sure if I can redistribute it), open source github repositories from friends and classmates, as well as the always helpful vhdlguru.blogspot.com

So i'll reccomend following one of the open lecture series posted above :)

This is a standard textbook on computer architecture across many universities in the US (and if my students are right, outside it as well). So it might be worth a read.

If this is absolutely the first time you are looking at architecture, http://www.amazon.com/Computer-Organization-Design-Fifth-Arc... by the same authors might be a easier entry point.