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

Virtualization and cloud computing

The terms virtualization and cloud computing are often tossed about with vague, sometimes overlapping meanings. Here is an attempt to highlight the difference between them:

  • Virtualization is a technology for abstracting software systems from the environment in which they operate.
  • Cloud computing is a methodology for employing virtualization and other technologies to enable the deployment, monitoring, and control of large-scale data centers.

The use of virtualization in cloud computing environments enables the flexible deployment of application workloads across an array of generic computing hardware in a controlled, coherent manner. By implementing applications such as web servers within virtual machines, it is possible to dynamically scale online computing capacity to match varying load conditions.

Commercial cloud service providers generally offer the use of their systems on a pay-per-capacity-used basis. A website that normally...