Computer Organization and Design: Hardware/Software Interface

by David A. Patterson, John L. Hennessy

Publisher: Morgan Kaufmann
ISBN: 0124077269

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Book Description

The 5th edition of Computer Organization and Design moves forward into the post-PC era with new examples, exercises, and material highlighting the emergence of mobile computing and the cloud. This generational change is emphasized and explored with updated content featuring tablet computers, cloud infrastructure, and the ARM (mobile computing devices) and x86 (cloud computing) architectures.

Because an understanding of modern hardware is essential to achieving good performance and energy efficiency, this edition adds a new concrete example, "Going Faster," used throughout the text to demonstrate extremely effective optimization techniques. Also new to this edition is discussion of the "Eight Great Ideas" of computer architecture.

As with previous editions, a MIPS processor is the core used to present the fundamentals of hardware technologies, assembly language, computer arithmetic, pipelining, memory hierarchies and I/O.

Instructors looking for 4th Edition teaching materials should e-mail textbook@elsevier.com.

• Includes new examples, exercises, and material highlighting the emergence of mobile computing and the Cloud.
• Covers parallelism in depth with examples and content highlighting parallel hardware and software topics
• Features the Intel Core i7, ARM Cortex-A8 and NVIDIA Fermi GPU as real-world examples throughout the book
• Adds a new concrete example, "Going Faster," to demonstrate how understanding hardware can inspire software optimizations that improve performance by 200 times.
• Discusses and highlights the "Eight Great Ideas" of computer architecture: Performance via Parallelism; Performance via Pipelining; Performance via Prediction; Design for Moore's Law; Hierarchy of Memories; Abstraction to Simplify Design; Make the Common Case Fast; and Dependability via Redundancy.
• Includes a full set of updated and improved exercises.

About the Author

David A. Patterson has been teaching computer architecture at the University of California, Berkeley, since joining the faculty in 1977, where he holds the Pardee Chair of Computer Science. His teaching has been honored by the Distinguished Teaching Award from the University of California, the Karlstrom Award from ACM, and the Mulligan Education Medal and Undergraduate Teaching Award from IEEE. Patterson received the IEEE Technical Achievement Award and the ACM Eckert-Mauchly Award for contributions to RISC, and he shared the IEEE Johnson Information Storage Award for contributions to RAID. He also shared the IEEE John von Neumann Medal and the C & C Prize with John Hennessy. Like his co-author, Patterson is a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, the Computer History Museum, ACM, and IEEE, and he was elected to the National Academy of Engineering, the National Academy of Sciences, and the Silicon Valley Engineering Hall of Fame. He served on the Information Technology Advisory Committee to the U.S. President, as chair of the CS division in the Berkeley EECS department, as chair of the Computing Research Association, and as President of ACM. This record led to Distinguished Service Awards from ACM and CRA.

John L. Hennessy is the tenth president of Stanford University, where he has been a member of the faculty since 1977 in the departments of electrical engineering and computer science. Hennessy is a Fellow of the IEEE and ACM; a member of the National Academy of Engineering, the National Academy of Science, and the American Philosophical Society; and a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. Among his many awards are the 2001 Eckert-Mauchly Award for his contributions to RISC technology, the 2001 Seymour Cray Computer Engineering Award, and the 2000 John von Neumann Award, which he shared with David Patterson. He has also received seven honorary doctorates.

Customer Reviews

As the title says, there is a lot of content in this book. If you're interested in the topic, that's wonderful, but having this as a text book for a class can become annoying. There are many tangents and side notes that, while interesting, extend the chapters more than they need to be. Otherwise it's well put together. I have not used any of the CD material yet, so I can't comment on that.

This was a required textbook for me but it was really great. Diagrams are clear and concise, with clear explanations. Almost every chapter includes several sections on theory and then one with a real-world example. I've seen other great computer architecture books, so I can't say definitely buy this one, but you won't be unhappy if you do.

Most textbooks are not that helpful for much more than reminding you of formulas or vocabulary, but this texbook does an excellent job of explaining and outlining CPU and Memory design and structure. The Appendix is also very helpful when designing RISC datapaths for various instructions. It breaks down the machine language clearly and gives an overall strong explaination of the topics. There are some curious design decisions for some of the datapath set ups that are a little unintuitive, but do still work.

The book in paperback is relatively cheap, so its a really good bargain. While it may be tempting to get the third edition, which is only a few cents, this version does have a lot of changes and updates. CPU technology has changed significantly over the last few years, so I recommend this book for anyone in this field.