Customer Reviews

The Anatomy of a High-Performance Microprocessor: A Systems Perspective

5 star:		(4)
4 star:		(1)
3 star:		(0)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

Being an ASIC designer, I bought this book to improve my understanding of the architecture and techniques used in high performance design. Looking at the book alone, I have a mixed feeling: the chapters that are dedicated inner workings of a processor completely satisfied my expectations. They include an in-depth description of all the main blocks that make a high-end processor or memory system work: register renaming, instruction decoding and scheduling, cache operation etc. This is really very excellent material! On the other hand, I consider the chapters dedicated to the system perspective to be of much lower quality and not in line with the title of the book. In a bit more than 100 pages, the author describes almost all other aspects of a modern PC, including Total-Cost-of-Ownership, Windows Qualification, Ethernet principles, Internet connectivity and even VESA Local Bus standard. Obviously, it is impossible to discuss such a wide range of topics in such a limited space. This flaw is compensated by a fantastic CD-ROM that contains an overwhelming library with a selection of research papers, articles from magazines, interviews and even a VHDL and Verilog simulator! Conclusion: I strongly recommend this book to anyone who wants to understand the secrets of a modern microprocessor. The removal of chapters about system aspects would have resulted in a 5 star rating.

This book is indeed an anatomy of high-performance processor design. In classic computer architecture books like Hennesey and Patterson's, it covers topics like out-of-order execution and speculative execution mechanisms, but only in abstract and algorithmic levels. This book uses an actual K6 microarchitecture as a foundation and explains these difficult concepts in RTL with pseudo code illustration. This can really help someone with purely ASIC background (knowledge of HDL) to fully understand the implementation of a RISC core with out-of-order and speculative execution capabilities

This is a very well made book and CD-ROM. The book is both clear and detailed. The title can be read to narrowly though. In addition to going through the K6 3D microprocessor, the book has a wealth of information on related issues. Among other things, I found it very interesting to read the perspectives provided by six of the IEEE/ACM Eckert-Mauchly award winners on significant past and present books/papers/lectures/events. The book has many pointers to the CD-ROM, and let me tell you, the CD-ROM is dynamite. It includes the hypertext version of the book, technical presentations, audio and video clips of the people behind the K6 3D, three demo simulators, and many technical research papers. The CD-ROM has provided me with many hours of browsing. I browse and check things using the CD-ROM, but I try to understand them with the book in front of me. The good integration between book and CD-ROM makes this natural. By the way, I even found the classic 1946 Princeton paper "Preliminary Discussion of the Logical Design of an Electronic Computing Instrument" by Burks, Goldstine, and von Neumann on the CD-ROM. It still makes for great reading.

I work in Retail computer Sales, and I have been searching for a book that allowed me to not just sell the computers but also to give me the technical edge above other competitors. Well this is the book that does it. Warning however, do not buy it if you are not a Engineer or have a craving interest in computer Science. I happend to have the craving interest in computer science. The CD Rom that comes with it is facinating. It's like haveing a PhD in CS 24/7. So far he (the Author) has been my best in-direct computer Science professor.

It contains a huge amount of interesting information and the CD-ROM that comes with it is just fascinating. This is a great book for learning about Microprocesser architecture.