Description

Teaching fundamental design concepts and the challenges of emerging technology, this textbook prepares students for a career designing the computer systems of the future. Self-contained yet concise, the material can be taught in a single semester, making it perfect for use in senior undergraduate and graduate computer architecture courses. This edition has a more streamlined structure, with the reliability and other technology background sections now included in the appendix. New material includes a chapter on GPUs, providing a comprehensive overview of their microarchitectures; sections focusing on new memory technologies and memory interfaces, which are key to unlocking the potential of parallel computing systems; deeper coverage of memory hierarchies including DRAM architectures, compression in memory hierarchies and an up-to-date coverage of prefetching. Practical examples demonstrate concrete applications of definitions, while the simple models and codes used throughout ensure the material is accessible to a broad range of computer engineering/science students.