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 pipelining

Before we introduce pipelining, we will first break down the execution of a single processor instruction into a sequence of discrete steps:

  • Fetch: The processor control unit accesses the memory address of the next instruction to execute, as determined by the previous instruction, or from the predefined reset value of the program counter immediately after power-on, or in response to an interrupt. Reading from this address, the control unit loads the instruction opcode into the processor's internal instruction register.
  • Decode: The control unit determines the actions to be taken during instruction execution. This may involve the ALU and may require read or write access to registers or memory locations.
  • Execute: The control unit executes the requested operation, invoking an ALU operation if required.
  • Writeback: The control unit writes the results of instruction execution to register or memory locations, and the program counter is updated...