Last year, we had computers architecture class where we study about the architecture of processors like RISC, CISC, SIMD... The teacher was a nice person but didn't have much knowledge on the field. I read some of Patterson&Hennessey book (computer organisation and design iirc) and learned how to use openmp and mpi, and then in the last lab we were required to optimize matrix multiplication using 4 threads in openmp, the best students optimiseed for 4 times at best, meanwhile I made 16 times optimisation and showed the teacher how fast it was. She was really impressed lol