Computer Organization and Architecture: Designing for Performance, 7th Edition

• Systems are viewed from both the architectural (attributes of a system visible to a machine language programmer) and organizational (operational units and their interconnections that realize the architecture) perspectives — Designed to present material within a useful context for clarity.

• Thorough coverage of computer arithmetic — Addresses twos complement and floating point representations and arithmetic, with detailed examination of IEEE 754.

• Liberal use of figures, tables, and examples — Provides

clarification of key concepts every step of the way.

• Detailed treatment of bus organization — Assists students in understanding thefunctioning of buses to evaluate key design issues.

• Unified, detailed treatment of I/O — Demonstrates the interaction of I/O modules with the outside world and the CPU. Provides full understanding of I/O functions and structures, including two important external interface examples: FireWire and InfiniBand.

• Strong chapter on RISC — Illustrates the importance of the technology found in virtually all contemporary machines.

• Thorough discussion of cache memory — Presents a clear review of the increasingly complex design of cache memory, a central element in the design of high-performance processors.

• Detailed treatment of internal and external memory — Delivers a unified discussion of the elements of the memory hierarchy, from registers to optical memory, as well as leading-edge areas, such as optical, advanced DRAM, and RAID disk arrays.

• Numerous running examples, especially Pentium 4, throughout the text — Highlights specific system examples to illustrate points and motivate the reader, with special attention to the most important CISC and superscalar systems, including Pentium 4 and PowerPC G4.

• Clear treatment of parallel processors — Exceptionally clear, well-organized treatment of symmetric multiprocessors (SMP), clusters, and NUMA systems.

• Full treatment of microprogrammed implementation — Provides a solid review of this often-overlooked area.

• Built-in assessment tools – Includes review questions for

each chapter, plus lists of key words and common acronyms.

• Companion Website -- Access textbook-related resources and support materials for students and instructors maintained by the author.

• Student Resource Site -- Access a wealth of computer science-related information including mathematics reviews, how-to documents, research resources, and career explorations maintained by the author.