Synopses & Reviews
The computing world today is in the middle of a revolution: mobile clients and cloud computing have emerged as the dominant paradigms driving programming and hardware innovation today. The Fifth Edition of
Computer Architecture focuses on this dramatic shift, exploring the ways in which software and technology in the "cloud" are accessed by cell phones, tablets, laptops, and other mobile computing devices. Each chapter includes two real-world examples, one mobile and one datacenter, to illustrate this revolutionary change.
- Updated to cover the mobile computing revolution
- Emphasizes the two most important topics in architecture today: memory hierarchy and parallelism in all its forms.
- Develops common themes throughout each chapter: power, performance, cost, dependability, protection, programming models, and emerging trends ("What's Next")
- Includes three review appendices in the printed text. Additional reference appendices are available online.
- Includes updated Case Studies and completely new exercises.
Review
Simply the best book available for computer architecture with state-of -the art content and a full range of accessible exercises and ancillaries.
Review
“If Neil Armstrong offers to give you a tour of the lunar module, or Tiger Woods asks you to go play golf with him, you should do it. When Hennessy and Patterson offer to lead you on a tour of where computer architecture is going, they call it Computer Architecture: A Quantitative Approach, 4th Edition. You need one. Tours leave on the hour.”
— Robert Colwell, Intel lead designer
“The book has been updated so it covers the latest computer architectures like the 64-bit AMD Opteron as well as those from Sun, Intel and other major vendors ... I highly recommend this book for those learning about computer architecture or those wanting to understand architectures that differ from those they are currently using. It does an excellent job of
covering most of the major architectural approaches employed today.”
— William Wong, Electronic Design, November 2006
“Computer hardware is entering into a new era, what with multicore processing, virtualization and other enhancements … Computer Architecture covers these topics and updates the insightful work in the earlier editions that laid out the full range of metrics needed for evaluating processor performance.”
— Joab Jackson, GCN, November 20, 2006
Review
"If Neil Armstrong offers to give you a tour of the lunar module, or Tiger Woods asks you to go play golf with him, you should do it. When Hennessy and Patterson offer to lead you on a tour of where computer architecture is going, they call it
Computer Architecture: A Quantitative Approach. You need one. Tours leave on the hour."
- Robert Colwell, Intel lead designer
Review
"What has made this book an enduring classic is that each edition is not an update, but an extensive revision that presents the most current information and unparalleled insight into this fascinating and fast changing field. For me, after over twenty years in this profession, it is also another opportunity to experience that student-grade admiration for two remarkable teachers." - From the Foreword by Luiz André Barroso, Google, Inc.
Synopsis
Computer Architecture: A Quantitative Approach, Fifth Edition, explores the ways that software and technology in the cloud are accessed by digital media, such as cell phones, computers, tablets, and other mobile devices. The book, which became a part of Intel's 2012 recommended reading list for developers, covers the revolution of mobile computing. It also highlights the two most important factors in architecture today: parallelism and memory hierarchy.
This fully updated edition is comprised of six chapters that follow a consistent framework: explanation of the ideas in each chapter; a crosscutting issues section, which presents how the concepts covered in one chapter connect with those given in other chapters; a putting it all together section that links these concepts by discussing how they are applied in real machine; and detailed examples of misunderstandings and architectural traps commonly encountered by developers and architects. Formulas for energy, static and dynamic power, integrated circuit costs, reliability, and availability are included. The book also covers virtual machines, SRAM and DRAM technologies, and new material on Flash memory. Other topics include the exploitation of instruction-level parallelism in high-performance processors, superscalar execution, dynamic scheduling and multithreading, vector architectures, multicore processors, and warehouse-scale computers (WSCs). There are updated case studies and completely new exercises. Additional reference appendices are available online.
This book will be a valuable reference for computer architects, programmers, application developers, compiler and system software developers, computer system designers and application developers.
- Part of Intel's 2012 Recommended Reading List for Developers
- Updated to cover the mobile computing revolution
- Emphasizes the two most important topics in architecture today: memory hierarchy and parallelism in all its forms.
- Develops common themes throughout each chapter: power, performance, cost, dependability, protection, programming models, and emerging trends ("What's Next")
- Includes three review appendices in the printed text. Additional reference appendices are available online.
- Includes updated Case Studies and completely new exercises.
About the Author
John L. Hennessy is the president of Stanford University, where he has been a member of the faculty since 1977 in the departments of electrical engineering and computer science. Hennessy is a fellow of the IEEE and the ACM, a member of the National Academy of Engineering, the National Academy of Science, the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and the Spanish Royal Academy of Engineering. He received the 2001 Eckert-Mauchly Award for his contributions to RISC technology, the 2001 Seymour Cray Computer Engineering Award, and shared the John von Neumann award in 2000 with David Patterson. After completing the project in 1984, he took a one-year leave from the university to co-found MIPS Computer Systems, which developed one of the first commercial RISC microprocessors. After being acquired by Silicon Graphics in 1991, MIPS Technologies became an independent company in 1998, focusing on microprocessors for the embedded marketplace. As of 2004, over 300 million MIPS microprocessors have been shipped in devices ranging from video games and palmtop computers to laser printers and network switches. Hennessy's more recent research at Stanford focuses on the area of designing and exploiting multiprocessors. He helped lead the design of the DASH multiprocessor architecture, the first distributed shared-memory multiprocessors supporting cache coherency, and the basis for several commercial multiprocessor designs, including the Silicon Graphics Origin multiprocessors. Since becoming president of Stanford, revising and updating this text and the more advanced Computer Architecture: A Quantitative Approach has become a primary form of recreation and relaxation.
David A. Patterson was the first in his family to graduate from college (1969 A.B UCLA), and he enjoyed it so much that he didn't stop until a PhD, (1976 UCLA). After 4 years developing a wafer-scale computer at Hughes Aircraft, he joined U.C. Berkeley in 1977. He spent 1979 at DEC working on the VAX minicomputer. He and colleagues later developed the Reduced Instruction Set Computer (RISC). By joining forces with IBM’s 801 and Stanford’s MIPS projects, RISC became widespread. In 1984 Sun Microsystems recruited him to start the SPARC architecture. In 1987, Patterson and colleagues wondered if tried building dependable storage systems from the new PC disks. This led to the popular Redundant Array of Inexpensive Disks (RAID). He spent 1989 working on the CM-5 supercomputer. Patterson and colleagues later tried building a supercomputer using standard desktop computers and switches. The resulting Network of Workstations (NOW) project led to cluster technology used by many startups. He is now working on the Recovery Oriented Computing (ROC) project. In the past, he served as Chair of Berkeley's CS Division, Chair and CRA. He is currently serving on the IT advisory committee to the U.S. President and has just been elected President of the ACM. All this resulted in 150 papers, 5 books, and the following honors, some shared with friends: election to the National Academy of Engineering; from the University of California: Outstanding Alumnus Award (UCLA Computer Science Department), McEntyre Award for Excellence in Teaching (Berkeley Computer Science), Distinguished Teaching Award (Berkeley); from ACM: fellow, SIGMOD Test of Time Award, Karlstrom Outstanding Educator Award; from IEEE: fellow, Johnson Information Storage Award, Undergraduate Teaching Award, Mulligan Education Medal, and von Neumann Medal.
Chair of Computer Science, University of California, Berkeley, USA
Table of Contents
Printed Text Chap 1: Fundamentals of Quantitative Design and Analysis Chap 2: Memory Hierarchy Design Chap 3: Instruction-Level Parallelism and Its Exploitation Chap 4: Data-Level Parallelism in Vector, SIMD, and GPU Architectures Chap 5: Multiprocessors and Thread-Level Parallelism Chap 6: The Warehouse-Scale Computer App A: Instruction Set Principles App B: Review of Memory Hierarchy App C: Pipelining: Basic and Intermediate Concepts
Online App D: Storage Systems App E: Embedded Systems App F: Interconnection Networks App G: Vector Processors App H: Hardware and Software for VLIW and EPIC App I: Large-Scale Multiprocessors and Scientific Applications App J: Computer Arithmetic App K: Survey of Instruction Set Architectures App L: Historical Perspectives