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

GPU processing

A GPU is a digital processor optimized to perform the mathematical operations associated with generating and rendering graphical images for display on a computer screen. The primary applications for GPUs are playing video recordings and creating synthetic images of three-dimensional scenes. The performance of a GPU is measured in terms of screen resolution (the pixel width and height of the image) and the image update rate in frames per second. Video playback and scene generation are hard real-time processes, in which any deviation from smooth, regularly time-spaced image updates is likely to be perceived by a user as unacceptable graphical stuttering.

As with the video cameras described earlier in this chapter, GPUs generally represent each pixel as three 8-bit color values, indicating the intensities of red, green, and blue. Any color can be produced by combining appropriate values for each of these three colors. Within each color channel, the value 0 indicates...