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

Chapter 5: Hardware-Software Interface

The vast majority of computer software is not written at the processor instruction level in assembly language. Most of the applications we work with on a daily basis are written in one high-level programming language or another, using a pre-built library of capabilities that the application programmers extended 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 at the level of processor instructions in device drivers. Several key aspects of operating systems will be covered in this chapter, including booting, multithreading, and multiprocessing.

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