| Computer Organization and Design, Fourth Edition: The Hardware/Software Interface (The Morgan Kaufmann Series in Computer Architecture and Design) |  | Authors: David A. Patterson, John L. Hennessy
Publisher: Morgan Kaufmann
Category: Book
List Price: $89.95
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Seller: Textbook_TBS
Rating:  98 reviews
Sales Rank: 776
Media: Paperback
Edition: 4
Pages: 912
Number Of Items: 1
Shipping Weight (lbs): 3.5
Dimensions (in): 9 x 7.5 x 1.7
ISBN: 0123744938
Dewey Decimal Number: 004.6
EAN: 9780123744937
ASIN: 0123744938
Publication Date: November 10, 2008
Availability: Usually ships in 1-2 business days
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| Editorial Reviews:
Amazon.com Review
This textbook provides a basic introduction to the fundamentals of current computer designs. As the title suggests, the text skirts the border between hardware and software. After an overview of the subject and a discussion of performance, the book launches into technical matter such as instruction sets, how they are constrained by the underlying processor hardware, the constraints on their design, and more. An excellent critique of computer arithmetic methods leads to a high-level discussion on processor design. Following is a great introduction to pipelining, nice coverage of memory issues, and solid attention to peripherals. The book concludes with a brief discussion of the additional issues inherent in multiprocessing machines. The extremely lucid description is grounded in real-world examples. Interesting exercises help reinforce the material, and each section contains a write-up of the historical background of each idea. IComputer Organization and Design/I is accessible to the beginner, but also offers plenty of valuable knowledge for experienced engineers.
Product Description
The classic textbook for computer systems analysis and design, iComputer Organization and Design/i, has been 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, benchmarking standards, languages and tools. 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. Along with its increased coverage of parallelism, this new edition offers new content on Flash memory and virtual machines as well as a new and important appendix written by industry experts covering the emergence and importance of the modern GPU (graphics processing unit), the highly parallel, highly multithreaded multiprocessor optimized for visual computing. brbrInstructors looking for 3rd edition teaching materials should e-mail textbook@elsevier.com. brbrA new exercise paradigm allows instructors to reconfigure the 600 exercises included in the book to easily generate new exercises and solutions of their own. brbrA CD provides a toolkit of simulators and compilers along with tutorials for using them as well as additional problems and solutions, and references.
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| Customer Reviews:
Showing reviews 1-5 of 98
 The chapter contents were decent, but the problems are horrible August 28, 2010
D. George (ID, USA)
1 out of 1 found this review helpful
First I will mention that I had no problem with the actual content presented in the chapters. This was a textbook for my Computer Architecture class, and the figures and presentation were fine. I really like the "pitfalls fallacies" section of each chapter, as well as the brief sections looking at how real processors apply ideas and looking at the histories of the processors. (Go ARM!)
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br /Now, as I mentioned this was a textbook for my class, and we were often assigned problems at the end of each chapter to do as homework. These problems are the sole reason I give this book a two star. There are so many problems that are very ambiguous as to what they are asking for. Also, I don't mind having multiple parts to a problem, but they went overboard with it. You have one problem with an A and B part, then the next with A-F that you need to perform for both A and B parts of the problem before. It would be MUCH more straightforward just to make all of these sections their own individual program and it would clear up a lot of the confusion that my whole class experienced.
Very useful reference August 6, 2010
J. L. Thoreen (Fort Walton Beach, Florida, USA)
I bought it for its extensive description of graphics processing units, and because of their use as parallel processors. In that, I was quite satisfied. I was impressed by the whole text. I am not expert enough to recommend it to computer designers, for the field has grown so dramatically since I retired 16 years ago, but my guess it would be a good reference to all.
 Examples are not great July 6, 2010
Klopp
Computer Organization and Design is an adequate text to teach you fundamentals of computer architecture and covers all the necessary material to have a basic understanding of the subject.
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br /That being said, the examples in the text are far too specific and more general examples would have better suited the purposes of this introductory book. If you have just begun to study this subject, you may have difficulty applying the new topics because of the uselessness of the example problems scattered throughout the text.
Excellent book March 5, 2010
Tony Hill (Sacarmento, CA)
This book begins to put all the pieces together as far as the hardware/software interface.
br /This is a really good book to understand how the computer works.
Ok, but not worth the buy February 20, 2010
Honest Review
1 out of 1 found this review helpful
There were many mistakes in this book...specifically in the answers provided. Our teacher used this book and specifically told us that there were mistakes in the solution guide, and he's been using all the previous revisions of this book since it was first published. He also said each edition was progressively getting worse.
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br /My experience with this book was that it really focused on the wrong things. MIPS is no longer a dominant architecture, and although easy to use as a teaching tool, I really despised being taught architecture using a dead architecture. This book was a decent exposure to assembly language programming. As far as architectures goes though, I thought it fell short.
Showing reviews 1-5 of 98
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