ISBN: 1040023436 9781040023433

Category: Computers / Computer Architecture

Page count: 541

<p>This easy-to-read textbook provides an introduction to computer architecture, focusing on the essential aspects of hardware that programmers need to know. Written from a programmer’s point of view, Essentials of Computer Architecture, Third Edition, covers the three key aspects of architecture: processors, physical and virtual memories, and input-output (I/O) systems.</p><p>This third edition is updated in view of advances in the field. Most students only have experience with high-level programming languages, and almost no experience tinkering with electronics and hardware. As such, this text is revised to follow a top-down approach, moving from discussions on how a compiler transforms a source program into binary code and data, to explanations of how a computer represents data and code in binary.</p><p>Additional chapters cover parallelism and data pipelining, assessing the performance of computer systems, and the important topic of power and energy consumption. Exclusive to this third edition, a new chapter explains multicore processors and how coherence hardware provides a consistent view of the values in memory even though each core has its own cache.</p><p>Suitable for a one-semester undergraduate course, this clear, concise, and easy-to-read textbook offers an ideal introduction to computer architecture for students studying computer programming.</p>