Book Image

Modern Computer Architecture and Organization – Second Edition - Second Edition

By : Jim Ledin
Book Image

Modern Computer Architecture and Organization – Second Edition - Second Edition

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 are overwhelmed by the complexity of modern systems? This step-by-step guide will teach you how modern computer systems work with the help of practical examples and exercises. You’ll gain insights into the internal behavior of processors down to the circuit level and will understand how the hardware executes code developed in high-level languages. This book will teach you the fundamentals of computer systems including transistors, logic gates, sequential logic, and instruction pipelines. 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 write a quantum computing program and run it on an actual quantum computer. This edition has been updated to cover the architecture and design principles underlying the important domains of cybersecurity, blockchain and bitcoin mining, and self-driving vehicles. By the end of this book, you will have a thorough understanding of modern processors and computer architecture and the future directions these technologies are likely to take.
Table of Contents (21 chapters)
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Index

Hardware-Software Interface

Most computer software is not written at the processor instruction level in assembly language. Almost all the applications we work with daily are written in one high-level programming language or another, relying on pre-existing libraries of capabilities that the application programmers built upon during the software development process. Practical programming environments, consisting of high-level languages and their associated libraries, offer many services, including disk input/output (I/O), network communication, and interactions with users, all easily accessible from program code.

This chapter describes the software layers that implement these features, beginning with processor instructions within device drivers. Several key aspects of operating systems will be covered in this chapter, including booting, process scheduling, multithreading, and multiprocessing.

After completing this chapter, you will understand the services provided by operating...