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

x64 architecture and instruction set

The original specification for a processor architecture extending the x86 processor and instruction set to 64 bits, named AMD64, was introduced by AMD in 2000. The first AMD64 processor, the Opteron, was released in 2003. Intel found itself following AMD's lead and developed an AMD64-compatible architecture, eventually given the name Intel 64. The first Intel processor that implemented their 64-bit architecture was the Xeon, introduced in 2004. The name of the architecture shared by AMD and Intel came to be called x86-64, reflecting the evolution of x86 to 64 bits, and in popular usage, this term has been shortened to x64.

The first Linux version supporting the x64 architecture was released in 2001, well before the first x64 processors were even available. Windows began supporting the x64 architecture in 2005.

Processors implementing the AMD64 and Intel 64 architectures are largely compatible at the instruction level of user mode programs...