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

SIMD processing

Processors that issue a single instruction, involving one or two data items, per clock cycle, are referred to as scalar processors. Processors capable of issuing multiple instructions per clock cycle, though not explicitly executing vector processing instructions, are called superscalar processors. Some algorithms benefit from explicitly vectorized execution, which means performing the same operation on multiple data items simultaneously. Processor instructions tailored to such tasks are called single instruction, multiple data (SIMD) instructions.

The simultaneously issued instructions in superscalar processors are generally performing different tasks on different data, representing a multiple instruction, multiple data (MIMD) parallel processing system. Some processing operations, such as the dot product operation used in digital signal processing described in Chapter 6, Specialized Computing Domains, perform the same mathematical operation on an array of values...