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

Summary

This chapter presented several computer system architectures tailored to particular user needs, and built on the topics covered in previous chapters. We looked at application categories including smartphones, gaming-focused personal computers, warehouse-scale computing, and neural networks. These examples provided a connection between the more theoretical discussions of computer and systems architectures and components presented in earlier chapters, and the real-world implementations of modern, high-performance computing systems.

Having completed this chapter, you should understand the decision processes used in defining computer architectures to support specific user needs. You will have gained insight into the key requirements driving smart mobile device architectures, high-performance personal computing architectures, warehouse-scale cloud-computing architectures, and advanced machine learning architectures.

In the next and final chapter, we will develop a view of...