Book Image

Modern Computer Architecture and Organization

By : Jim Ledin
Book Image

Modern Computer Architecture and Organization

By: Jim Ledin

Overview of this book

Are you a software developer, systems designer, or computer architecture student looking for a methodical introduction to digital device architectures but overwhelmed by their complexity? This book will help you to learn how modern computer systems work, from the lowest level of transistor switching to the macro view of collaborating multiprocessor servers. You'll gain unique insights into the internal behavior of processors that execute the code developed in high-level languages and enable you to design more efficient and scalable software systems. The book will teach you the fundamentals of computer systems including transistors, logic gates, sequential logic, and instruction operations. You will learn details of modern processor architectures and instruction sets including x86, x64, ARM, and RISC-V. You will see how to implement a RISC-V processor in a low-cost FPGA board and how to write a quantum computing program and run it on an actual quantum computer. By the end of this book, you will have a thorough understanding of modern processor and computer architectures and the future directions these architectures are likely to take.
Table of Contents (20 chapters)
1
Section 1: Fundamentals of Computer Architecture
8
Section 2: Processor Architectures and Instruction Sets
14
Section 3: Applications of Computer Architecture

Summary

Having completed this chapter, you should have a good understanding of the top-level architectures and features of the x86, x64, 32-bit ARM, and 64-bit ARM registers, instruction sets, and assembly languages.

The x86 and x64 architectures represent a mostly CISC approach to processor design, with variable-length instructions that can take many cycles to execute, a lengthy pipeline, and (in x86) a limited number of processor registers.

The ARM architectures, on the other hand, are RISC processors with mostly single-cycle instruction execution, a large register set, and (somewhat) fixed-length instructions. Early versions of ARM had pipelines as short as three stages, though later versions have considerably more stages.

Is one of these architectures better than the other, in a general sense? It may be that each is better in some ways, and system designers must make their selection of processor architecture based on the specific needs of the system under development....