Computer Organization and Design, Fourth Edition: The Hardware/Software Interface (The Morgan Kaufmann Series in Computer Architecture and Design)

The best-selling computer organization book is thoroughly updated to provide a new focus on the revolutionary change taking place in industry today: the switch from uniprocessor to multicore microprocessors. This new emphasis on parallelism is supported by updates reflecting the newest technologies, with examples highlighting the latest processor designs and benchmarking standards. 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.

A 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.

• Covers the revolutionary change from sequential to parallel computing, with a new chapter on parallelism and sections in every chapter highlighting parallel hardware and software topics.


• Includes a new 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.


• Describes a novel approach to measuring multicore performance--the "Roofline model"--with benchmarks and analysis for the AMD Opteron X4, Intel Xeon 5000, Sun UltraSPARC T2, and IBM Cell.


• Includes new content on Flash memory and Virtual Machines.


• Provides a large, stimulating set of new exercises, covering almost 200 pages.


• Features the AMD Opteron X4 and Intel Nehalem as real-world examples throughout the book.


• Updates all processor performance examples using the SPEC CPU2006 suite.