Computer Organization and Design, Fourth Edition: The Hardware/Software Interface

This Fourth Revised Edition of Computer Organization and Design includes a complete set of updated and new exercises, along with improvements and changes suggested by instructors and students. Focusing on the revolutionary change taking place in industry today--the switch from uniprocessor to multicore microprocessors--this classic textbook has a modern and up-to-date focus on parallelism in all its forms. Examples highlighting multicore and GPU processor designs are supported with performance and benchmarking data. 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. Sections on the ARM and x86 architectures are also included. The companion CD provides a toolkit of simulators and compilers along with tutorials for using them, as well as advanced content for further study and a search utility for finding content on the CD and in the printed text. This Revised Fourth Edition of Computer Organization and Design has been updated with new exercises and improvements throughout suggested by instructors teaching from the book Covers the revolutionary change from sequential to parallel computing, with a chapter on parallelism and sections in every chapter highlighting parallel hardware and software topics Includes an appendix by the Chief Scientist and the Director of Architecture of NVIDIA covering the emergence and importance of the modern GPU, describing in detail for the first time the highly parallel, highly multithreaded multiprocessor optimized for visual computing