A beautifully designed guidebook to the unnoticed yet essential elements of our cities, from the creators of the wildly popular 99% Invisible podcast

It is a great pleasure to write a preface to this book. In my view, the content is unique in that it blends traditional teaching approaches with the use of mathematics and a mainstream Hardware Design Language (HDL) as formalisms to describe key concepts. The book keeps the “machine” separate from the “application” by strictly following a bottom-up approach: it starts with transistors and logic gates and only introduces assembly language programs once their execution by a processor is clearly de ned. Using a HDL, Verilog in this case, rather than static circuit diagrams is a big deviation from traditional books on computer architecture. Static circuit diagrams cannot be explored in a hands-on way like the corresponding Verilog model can. In order to understand why I consider this shift so important, one must consider how computer architecture, a subject that has been studied for more than 50 years, has evolved. In the pioneering days computers were constructed by hand. An entire computer could (just about) be described by drawing a circuit diagram. Initially, such d- grams consisted mostly of analogue components before later moving toward d- ital logic gates. The advent of digital electronics led to more complex cells, such as half-adders, ip- ops, and decoders being recognised as useful building blocks.

This textbook provides semester-length coverage of computer architecture and design, providing a strong foundation for students to understand modern computer system architecture and to apply these insights and principles to future computer designs. It is based on the author’s decades of industrial experience with computer architecture and design, as well as with teaching students focused on pursuing careers in computer engineering. Unlike a number of existing textbooks for this course, this one focuses not only on CPU architecture, but also covers in great detail in system buses, peripherals and memories. This book teaches every element in a computing system in two steps. First, it introduces the functionality of each topic (and subtopics) and then goes into “from-scratch design” of a particular digital block from its architectural specifications using timing diagrams. The author describes how the data-path of a certain digital block is generated using timing diagrams, a method which most textbooks do not cover, but is valuable in actual practice. In the end, the user is ready to use both the design methodology and the basic computing building blocks presented in the book to be able to produce industrial-strength designs.

Future computing professionals must become familiar with historical computer architectures because many of the same or similar techniques are still being used and may persist well into the future. Computer Architecture: Fundamentals and Principles of Computer Design discusses the fundamental principles of computer design and performance enhancement that have proven effective and demonstrates how current trends in architecture and implementation rely on these principles while expanding upon them or applying them in new ways. Rather than focusing on a particular type of machine, this textbook explains concepts and techniques via examples drawn from various architectures and implementations. When necessary, the author creates simplified examples that clearly explain architectural and implementation features used across many computing platforms. Following an introduction that discusses the difference between architecture and implementation and how they relate, the next four chapters cover the architecture of traditional, single-processor systems that are still, after 60 years, the most widely used computing machines. The final two chapters explore approaches to adopt when single-processor systems do not reach desired levels of performance or are not suited for intended applications. Topics include parallel systems, major classifications of architectures, and characteristics of unconventional systems of the past, present, and future. This textbook provides students with a thorough grounding in what constitutes high performance and how to measure it, as well as a full familiarity in the fundamentals needed to make systems perform better. This knowledge enables them to understand and evaluate the many new systems they will encounter throughout their professional careers.

THE COMPUTER ARCHITECTURE MCQ (MULTIPLE CHOICE QUESTIONS) SERVES AS A VALUABLE RESOURCE FOR INDIVIDUALS AIMING TO DEEPEN THEIR UNDERSTANDING OF VARIOUS COMPETITIVE EXAMS, CLASS TESTS, QUIZ COMPETITIONS, AND SIMILAR ASSESSMENTS. WITH ITS EXTENSIVE COLLECTION OF MCQS, THIS BOOK EMPOWERS YOU TO ASSESS YOUR GRASP OF THE SUBJECT MATTER AND YOUR PROFICIENCY LEVEL. BY ENGAGING WITH THESE MULTIPLE-CHOICE QUESTIONS, YOU CAN IMPROVE YOUR KNOWLEDGE OF THE SUBJECT, IDENTIFY AREAS FOR IMPROVEMENT, AND LAY A SOLID FOUNDATION. DIVE INTO THE COMPUTER ARCHITECTURE MCQ TO EXPAND YOUR COMPUTER ARCHITECTURE KNOWLEDGE AND EXCEL IN QUIZ COMPETITIONS, ACADEMIC STUDIES, OR PROFESSIONAL ENDEAVORS. THE ANSWERS TO THE QUESTIONS ARE PROVIDED AT THE END OF EACH PAGE, MAKING IT EASY FOR PARTICIPANTS TO VERIFY THEIR ANSWERS AND PREPARE EFFECTIVELY.

This best-selling title, considered for over a decade to be essential reading for every serious student and practitioner of computer design, has been updated throughout to address the most important trends facing computer designers today. In this edition, the authors bring their trademark method of quantitative analysis not only to high performance desktop machine design, but also to the design of embedded and server systems. They have illustrated their principles with designs from all three of these domains, including examples from consumer electronics, multimedia and web technologies, and high performance computing. The book retains its highly rated features: Fallacies and Pitfalls, which share the hard-won lessons of real designers; Historical Perspectives, which provide a deeper look at computer design history; Putting it all Together, which present a design example that illustrates the principles of the chapter; Worked Examples, which challenge the reader to apply the concepts, theories and methods in smaller scale problems; and Cross-Cutting Issues, which show how the ideas covered in one chapter interact with those presented in others. In addition, a new feature, Another View, presents brief design examples in one of the three domains other than the one chosen for Putting It All Together. The authors present a new organization of the material as well, reducing the overlap with their other text, Computer Organization and Design: A Hardware/Software Approach 2/e, and offering more in-depth treatment of advanced topics in multithreading, instruction level parallelism, VLIW architectures, memory hierarchies, storage devices and network technologies. Also new to this edition, is the adoption of the MIPS 64 as the instruction set architecture. In addition to several online appendixes, two new appendixes will be printed in the book: one contains a complete review of the basic concepts of pipelining, the other provides solutions a selection of the exercises. Both will be invaluable to the student or professional learning on her own or in the classroom. Hennessy and Patterson continue to focus on fundamental techniques for designing real machines and for maximizing their cost/performance. * Presents state-of-the-art design examples including: * IA-64 architecture and its first implementation, the Itanium * Pipeline designs for Pentium III and Pentium IV * The cluster that runs the Google search engine * EMC storage systems and their performance * Sony Playstation 2 * Infiniband, a new storage area and system area network * SunFire 6800 multiprocessor server and its processor the UltraSPARC III * Trimedia TM32 media processor and the Transmeta Crusoe processor * Examines quantitative performance analysis in the commercial server market and the embedded market, as well as the traditional desktop market. Updates all the examples and figures with the most recent benchmarks, such as SPEC 2000. * Expands coverage of instruction sets to include descriptions of digital signal processors, media processors, and multimedia extensions to desktop processors. * Analyzes capacity, cost, and performance of disks over two decades. Surveys the role of clusters in scientific computing and commercial computing. * Presents a survey, taxonomy, and the benchmarks of errors and failures in computer systems. * Presents detailed descriptions of the design of storage systems and of clusters. * Surveys memory hierarchies in modern microprocessors and the key parameters of modern disks. * Presents a glossary of networking terms.

Hardware correctness is becoming ever more important in the design of computer systems. The authors introduce a powerful new approach to the design and analysis of modern computer architectures, based on mathematically well-founded formal methods which allows for rigorous correctness proofs, accurate hardware costs determination, and performance evaluation. This book develops, at the gate level, the complete design of a pipelined RISC processor with a fully IEEE-compliant floating-point unit. In contrast to other design approaches, the design presented here is modular, clean and complete.

Computer Architecture/Software Engineering