Essentials of Computer Architecture

by Douglas E. Comer

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 processors, physical and virtual memories, and input-output (I/O) systems.

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.

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.

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.

Genres: Computer Science, Technology, Software

Kindle Edition

First published August 13, 2004

Reviews

[Adna Cazinkić · Rating 5 out of 5]

excelent

[Chris Reilly · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is a fantastic book to read if you are interested in understanding the computer as a whole. It is well-written and will surely give you a new way to look at computer software as well as hardware.