Computer Organization and Design, Enhanced

Computer Organization and Design, Fifth Edition, moves into the post-PC era with new examples and material highlighting the emergence of mobile computing and the cloud. The book explores this generational change with updated content featuring tablet computers, cloud infrastructure, and the ARM (mobile computing devices) and x86 (cloud computing) architectures. This new edition provides in-depth coverage of parallelism with examples and content highlighting parallel hardware and software topics. It features the Intel Core i7, ARM Cortex-A8 and NVIDIA Fermi GPU as real-world examples throughout the book. It also adds a new concrete example, Going Faster, to demonstrate how understanding hardware can inspire software optimizations that improve performance by 200 times. Other topics covered include: the Eight Great Ideas of computer architecture; performance via parallelism; performance via pipelining; performance via prediction; design for Moore's Law; hierarchy of memories; abstraction to simplify design; and dependability via redundancy. The book includes a full set of updated and improved exercises as well as pop-up definitions for technical terms and concepts. Furthermore, it features interactive learning assessments that provide instant feedback in the form of true/false, multiple choice, and short essay questions. This book will appeal to professionals in computer organization and design as well as students with interest or are taking courses in this subject. - Winner of a 2014 Texty Award from the Text and Academic Authors Association - Includes new examples, exercises, and material highlighting the emergence of mobile computing and the cloud - Covers parallelism in depth with examples and content highlighting parallel hardware and software topics - Features the Intel Core i7, ARM Cortex-A8 and NVIDIA Fermi GPU as real-world examples throughout the book - Adds a new concrete example, "Going Faster," to demonstrate how understanding hardware can inspire software optimizations that improve performance by 200 times - Discusses and highlights the "Eight Great Ideas" of computer architecture: Performance via Parallelism; Performance via Pipelining; Performance via Prediction; Design for Moore's Law; Hierarchy of Memories; Abstraction to Simplify Design; Make the Common Case Fast; and Dependability via Redundancy - Includes a full set of updated and improved exercises - Features interactive learning assessments that provide instant feedback in the form of true/false, multiple choice, and short essay questions. - Includes pop-up definitions for technical terms and concepts.