Computer Organization and Design: The Hardware/Software Interface. Third Edition, Revised [Paperback]

David A. Patterson (Author), John L. Hennessy (Author)

Book Description

ISBN-10: 0123706068 | ISBN-13: 978-0123706065 | Publication Date: June 20, 2007 | Edition: 3

What's New in the Third Edition, Revised Printing

The same great book gets better! This revised printing features all of the original content along with these additional features:

. Appendix A (Assemblers, Linkers, and the SPIM Simulator) has been moved from the CD-ROM into the printed book

. Corrections and bug fixes

Third Edition features

New pedagogical features

. Understanding Program Performance
- Analyzes key performance issues from the programmer's perspective
. Check Yourself Questions
- Helps students assess their understanding of key points of a section
. Computers In the Real World
- Illustrates the diversity of applications of computing technology beyond traditional desktop and servers
. For More Practice
- Provides students with additional problems they can tackle
. In More Depth
- Presents new information and challenging exercises for the advanced student

New reference features

. Highlighted glossary terms and definitions appear on the book page, as bold-faced entries in the index, and as a separate and searchable reference on the CD.
. A complete index of the material in the book and on the CD appears in the printed index and the CD includes a fully searchable version of the same index.
. Historical Perspectives and Further Readings have been updated and expanded to include the history of software R&D.
. CD-Library provides materials collected from the web which directly support the text.


In addition to thoroughly updating every aspect of the text to reflect the most current computing technology, the third edition

. Uses standard 32-bit MIPS 32 as the primary teaching ISA.
. Presents the assembler-to-HLL translations in both C and Java.
. Highlights the latest developments in architecture in Real Stuff sections:
- Intel IA-32
- Power PC 604
- Google's PC cluster
- Pentium P4
- SPEC CPU2000 benchmark suite for processors
- SPEC Web99 benchmark for web servers
- EEMBC benchmark for embedded systems
- AMD Opteron memory hierarchy
- AMD vs. 1A-64

New support for distinct course goals

Many of the adopters who have used our book throughout its two editions are refining their courses with a greater hardware or software focus. We have provided new material to support these course goals:

New material to support a Hardware Focus

. Using logic design conventions
. Designing with hardware description languages
. Advanced pipelining
. Designing with FPGAs
. HDL simulators and tutorials
. Xilinx CAD tools

New material to support a Software Focus

. How compilers work
. How to optimize compilers
. How to implement object oriented languages
. MIPS simulator and tutorial
. History sections on programming languages, compilers, operating systems and databases


On the CD

. NEW: Search function to search for content on both the CD-ROM and the printed text
. CD-Bars: Full length sections that are introduced in the book and presented on the CD
. CD-Appendixes: Appendices B-D
. CD-Library: Materials collected from the web which directly support the text
. CD-Exercises: For More Practice provides exercises and solutions for self-study
. In More Depth presents new information and challenging exercises for the advanced or curious student
. Glossary: Terms that are defined in the text are collected in this searchable reference
. Further Reading: References are organized by the chapter they support
. Software: HDL simulators, MIPS simulators, and FPGA design tools
. Tutorials: SPIM, Verilog, and VHDL
. Additional Support: Processor Models, Labs, Homeworks, Index covering the book and CD contents

Instructor Support

Instructor support provided on textbooks.elsevier.com:

. Solutions to all the exercises
. Figures from the book in a number of formats
. Lecture slides prepared by the authors and other instructors
. Lecture notes

*For the Revised Printing, Appendix A appears in the printed book rather than on the CD. This is the only change.
*Explains the latest benchmarking software including SPEC CPU2000 suite for processors, SPEC Web99 for web servers, and EEMBC for embedded systems
*Features the latest developments of the Intel IA-32 architecture as well as the Power PC 604, the AMD Opteron Memory, and the Intrinsity FastMATH processor.
*Compares MIPs assembler code to both C and Java

Editorial Reviews

Review

"The choice of 'Real Stuff' is judicious. The 'Computers in the Real World' sections are interesting to read and should widen the horizons of the too often too tech-oriented Sophomores and Juniors. On the whole this is a very solid book and the success of the third edition is assured as has been the success of its two predecessors."
-Jean-Loup Baer, University of Washington

"I am very impressed with the new sections 'Computers in the Real World.' It is very interesting and speaks to the students who would like to feel a connection between classroom materials and real-world applications. I am very pleased with the manuscript for the third edition. This revision is well-updated and a comprehensive introduction to the hardware and software fundamentals."
-David Brooks, Harvard University

"The logical development and explanations and examples were always great to begin with. The 'Historical Perspectives' have become even better-- they are part of the book that I enjoy most."
-David Harris, Harvey Mudd

Book Description

A thourough update of the Morgan Kaufmann classic. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

See all Editorial Reviews

Product Details

• Paperback: 621 pages
• Publisher: Morgan Kaufmann; 3 edition (June 20, 2007)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0123706068
• ISBN-13: 978-0123706065
• Product Dimensions: 9 x 7.9 x 1.5 inches
• Shipping Weight: 2.8 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 4.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (41 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #149,463 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
  • #91 in Books > Computers & Technology > Hardware > Design & Architecture

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

96 of 101 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Very Informative, But Has Many Editing Problems, March 18, 2005

By 

David A. Lessnau (USA) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Computer Organization and Design, Third Edition: The Hardware/Software Interface, Third Edition (The Morgan Kaufmann Series in Computer Architecture and Design) (Paperback)

This is a tough book to review. On one hand, it's got an amazing amount of information in it. On the other, it's got a lot of editing problems. It also suffers from a lack of focus on who its audience is. So, splitting the difference, I'm rating this book at 4 stars out of 5.

Regarding the book's audience, it's vital that you pay attention to the chart on page xiii of the Preface. It maps your path through the book based on whether you're a software-type or a hardware-type. Assuming I was so brilliant that I could ignore such trivia, I attempted to plow my way through the whole book. Software-type that I am, I had some tough times in a couple of sections and then utterly failed to understand anything when I hit the core of Chapter 5. If I had paid attention to that chart, I would have known to skip that part of the book. However, even for the material that's within the path laid out for you by that chart, a lot of the work seems to assume knowledge on the part of the reader. For instance:

- Chapter 2 is about the MIPS assembly language. In the exercises, you're supposed to write various code snippets. Many of these snippets assume far more familiarity with writing entire assembly programs than is presented.
- The exercises at the end of each chapter are broken into three types: regular, "For More Practice," and "In More Depth." Those last two types require far more knowledge than is presented. It looks like the authors culled them from previous editions and, instead of trashing them, just stuck them on the CD and referenced them.
- Exercise 3.9 is annotated as requiring Section 3.2. But, unless you're very familiar with the implementation of MIPS assembly language, there's no way that someone using the material in that section alone could do the problem.
- Exercise 3.13 is annotated as requiring Section 3.3. Yet, the question is completely undoable unless you've at least read Appendix B. Of course, Appendix B, itself, is practically indecipherable unless you've had previous experience/knowledge with Logic Design.
- Exercises 7.21, 7.22 and 7.38 talk about "the first 1 million references in a trace of gcc." The book contains no definition of what that means. Those questions also mention the cache simulator "dinero" and say, "see the Preface of this book for information on how to obtain them." There's no such information in the Preface or on the CD. The CD does have MipsIt software which includes a cache simulator, but it doesn't seem to work reliably on my XP SP2 system (it also doesn't seem to accept those "traces" as input). That could be operator error, though. Doing a Google search pointed me to max.stanford.edu as a source of the software and traces. But, it seems you have to have a Linux system (or be smarter than me) to use them.
- Exercise 7.35 gives a C code snippet and asks you to calculate the expected cache miss rate. There's nothing in the book about calculating expected miss rates from algorithms. Also, the exercise is assigned partially against section 7.4. Section 7.4 covers virtual memory, not caches.
- Most of the Chapter 8 exercises are mis-referenced (i.e., they're labeled as being associated with certain sections of the chapter which have nothing to do with the question). Along with the standard problem of assuming knowledge that's not covered in the book, many of them teach new information instead of testing/re-enforcing comprehension of the provided material.

There are many incorrect page number and section number references in the book. This is especially bad in the exercises where it becomes impossible to do certain ones since the code and data they're referencing isn't findable (at least easily). This problem does seem to get better as you get to the later chapters. There are also problems with basic typography. Some examples:

- Exercise 3.29 wants the reader to come up with a non-restoring division algorithm based on the restoring division algorithm in Figure 3.11 on page 185. The figure and page numbers are right, but the text of the question refers to "step 3b" and "restoring the Remainder" that aren't present there. So, there's no way to figure out what the authors are doing or what they want the reader to do in the exercise.
- Many of the tables and diagrams in the book use "color" to help indicate something important. Unfortunately, the color used is dark blue. Unless you look very carefully, there's no difference between the regular text/line color (black) and the "emphasized" version.
- The text description of Figure 7.31 on page 544 mentions labeled sections that show differences in performance based on cache associativity. The labels are missing.
- Exercise 7.45 gives you a C snippet that you're supposed to document. It contains "!!" as an operator. C has no such operator. My guess is it's either a logical AND, "&&", or a logical OR, "||".

Also, the chapters are WAY too long and there are no exercises following the sections. For instance, Chapter 2 is 100 pages long over 20 sections. All the exercises (59 of them) are clumped together in the back of the chapter. The authors note the necessary section numbers with these exercises, but each section needs its own set of exercises immediately following it. This would also alleviate the problem where the authors have the wrong section numbers assigned to exercises. If these exercises were at the end of a section instead of clumped with 60 other exercises at the back of the chapter, they'd stand out more if they didn't belong.

And, finally, the book needs answers to the questions.

As an aside, this book is used in Florida State University's (FSU) CDA 3101: Computer Organization course.

16 of 18 people found the following review helpful:

2.0 out of 5 stars Good information; poor presentation, November 26, 2006

By 

Christopher D. Smith (Colorado Springs, CO) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Computer Organization and Design, Third Edition: The Hardware/Software Interface, Third Edition (The Morgan Kaufmann Series in Computer Architecture and Design) (Paperback)

The information contained in this book is sound, and the coverage of a variety of topics is relatively thorough. It is, however, difficult to appreciate these strengths given the numerous flaws in the text. Minor flaws include numerous misleading typographical errors, and too little attention to the flow of information.

The big mistake, though, is the failure to publish a complete book. If you want to learn from this book, then you will need to spend a good bit of time either sitting at a computer reading, or printing out the PDF files on the accompanying CD. The appendices (which are not extraneous, but rather a fundamental part of the text which contain information that's referred to throughout the book) are included ONLY on the accompanying CD. For more than 50% of the review exercises are just references to PDF files. The contents of the CD are not available from the publisher's web site. Do NOT buy a used copy of this book that's missing the accompanying CD. If you like taking books with you to read away from the office, don't buy this book at all. You'll spend too much effort wondering why the printer felt the need to offload a good bit of the printing work onto you. All of this is made even less tolerable by the poor information flow, which will leave you needing to make reference to the appendices many times throughout virtually all other chapters of the book.

It's possible that a future edition may fix these issues. Until then, there have to be better ways to learn.

9 of 10 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Good technical introduction to computer organization topics, March 16, 2005

By 

Jose Portillo (Caracas, Venezuela) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Computer Organization and Design, Third Edition: The Hardware/Software Interface, Third Edition (The Morgan Kaufmann Series in Computer Architecture and Design) (Paperback)

I use this book as a reference in my technical writing.
I recommend this book to everyone who have a basic Assembly Language programming background and want to understand everything behind the Machine Language Operation Codes decoding process.

The authors build from scratch (and you learn from scratch):

* How to build a complete Arithmetic and Logic (ALU) Unit
- Basic Logic Gates processing
- more advanced topics as Ripple Carry

* How to build a complete Control Unit to guide the ALU Operation
- Microprogramming vs. Hardwired Control Implementation

* Assembly language examples for programming the Control Unit

It is a good Technical Book in this area.

Complement the study of this book with the Assembly Language Programming presented in the book "The Art of Computing Programming", Volume 1 by Donald Knuth (also, if you need more application examples of low level programming, review Volume 3 "Sorting and Searching"). This is a very good study track.