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2 CHAPTER 0 / READER’S GUIDE

This book, with its accompanying Web site, covers a lot of material. In this chapter, we
give the reader an overview.

0.1 OUTLINE OF THE BOOK

The book is organized into five parts:
Part One: Provides an overview of computer organization and architecture
and looks at how computer design has evolved.
Part Two: Examines the major components of a computer and their intercon-
nections, both with each other and the outside world. This part also includes a
detailed discussion of internal and external memory and of input–output
(I/O). Finally, the relationship between a computer’s architecture and the op-
erating system running on that architecture is examined.
Part Three: Examines the internal architecture and organization of the proces-
sor.This part begins with an extended discussion of computer arithmetic.Then
it looks at the instruction set architecture.The remainder of the part deals with
the structure and function of the processor, including a discussion of reduced
instruction set computer (RISC) and superscalar approaches.
Part Four: Discusses the internal structure of the processor’s control unit and
the use of microprogramming.
Part Five: Deals with parallel organization, including symmetric multiprocess-
ing, clusters, and multicore architecture.
A number of online chapters and appendices at this book’s Web site cover
additional topics relevant to the book.
A more detailed, chapter-by-chapter summary of each part appears at the
beginning of that part.
This text is intended to acquaint you with the design principles and implemen-
tation issues of contemporary computer organization and architecture.Accordingly,
a purely conceptual or theoretical treatment would be inadequate. This book uses
examples from a number of different machines to clarify and reinforce the concepts
being presented. Many, but by no means all, of the examples are drawn from two
computer families: the Intel x86 family and the ARM (Advanced RISC Machine)
family.These two systems together encompass most of the current computer design
trends. The Intel x86 architecture is essentially a complex instruction set computer
(CISC) with some RISC features, while the ARM is essentially a RISC. Both sys-
tems make use of superscalar design principles and both support multiple processor
and multicore configurations.

0.2 A ROADMAP FOR READERS AND INSTRUCTORS

This book follows a top-down approach to the presentation of the material.As we
discuss in more detail in Section 1.2, a computer system can be viewed as a hierar-
chical structure. At a top level, we are concerned with the major components of