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

Instruction categories

This section lists the categories of instructions available in the 6502 processor. The purpose of discussing the 6502 here is to introduce the concepts associated with the instruction set of a processor architecture that is much simpler than the modern 32- and 64-bit processors we will examine in later chapters. By the time we get to those processors, the underlying instruction set concepts should be quite familiar to you.

Memory load and store instructions

The 6502 uses load and store instructions to read data values from system memory into processor registers and to write registers out to system memory. In the 6502 architecture, the LDA, LDX, and LDY instructions load the register identified in the instruction with an 8-bit word from system memory. LDA supports all addressing modes available in the 6502, while LDX and LDY each support a more limited subset of addressing modes: immediate, absolute, and absolute indexed.

After each of these instructions...