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

Examples of specialized architectures

This section examines some application-focused computing system configurations and highlights the specialized requirements addressed in the design of each. The configurations we will look at are as follows:

  • Cloud compute server: A number of vendors offer access to computing platforms accessible to customers via the Internet. These servers allow users to load their own software applications onto the cloud server and perform any type of computation they desire. In general, these services bill their customers based on the type and quantity of computing resources being used and the length of time they are in use. The advantage for the customer is that these services cost nothing unless they are actually in use.

    At the higher end of performance, servers containing multiple interconnected GPU cards can be harnessed to perform large-scale, floating-point intensive computations on huge datasets. In the cloud context, it is straightforward and often...