The Unabridged Pentium 4: IA32 Processor Genealogy (Paperback)

~ Mindshare Inc. (Author), (Author)

Editorial Reviews

Product Description

The Unabridged Pentium 4 offers unparalleled coverage of Intel's IA32 family of processors, from the 386 through the Pentium 4 and Pentium M processors. Unlike other texts, which address solely a hardware or software audience, this book serves as a comprehensive technical reference for both audiences. Inside, the Mindshare trainers cover not only the hardware design and software enhancements of Intel's latest processors, they also explain the relationship between these hardware and software characteristics.

As a result, readers will come away with a complete understanding of the processor's internal architecture, the Front Side Bus (FSB), the processor's relationship to the system, and the processor's software architecture.

Essential topics covered include:

Goals of single-task and multi-task operating systems
The 386 processor—the baseline ancestor of the IA32 processor family
The 486 processor, including a cache primer
The Pentium processor
The P6 roadmap, P6 processor core, and P6 FSB
The Pentium Pro processor, including the Microcode Update feature
Pentium II and the Pentium II Xeon processors
Pentium III and Pentium III Xeon processors
The Pentium 4 processor family
The Pentium M processor
Processor identification, System Management Mode, and the IO and Local APICs
An "at-a-glance" table of contents allows readers to quickly find topics ranging from 386 Demand Mode Paging to Pentium 4 CPU Arbitration. An accompanying CD-ROM contains additional book material.

Whether you design software or hardware or are responsible for system maintenance or customer support, The Unabridged Pentium 4 will prove an invaluable reference to the world's most widely used microprocessor chips.

From the Back Cover

“In this monumental new book, Tom Shanley pulls together 15 years of history of Intel’s mainline microprocessors, the most popular and important computer architecture in history. Shanley has a keen eye for the salient facts, and an outstanding sense for how to organize and display the material for easy accessibility by the reader. If you want to know what does this bit control, what does that feature do, and how did those instructions evolve through several generations of x86, this is the reference book for you. This is the book Intel should have written, but now they don’t have to.”

         —Bob Colwell, Intel Fellow

The Unabridged Pentium 4 offers unparalleled coverage of Intel’s IA32 family of processors, from the 386 through the Pentium 4 and Pentium M processors. Unlike other texts, which address solely a hardware or software audience, this book serves as a comprehensive technical reference for both audiences. Inside, Tom Shanley covers not only the hardware design and software enhancements of Intel’s latest processors, he also explains the relationship between these hardware and software characteristics. As a result, readers will come away with a complete understanding of the processor’s internal architecture, the Front Side Bus (FSB), the processor’s relationship to the system, and the processor’s software architecture.

Essential topics covered include:

• Goals of single-task and multi-task operating systems
• The 386 processor—the baseline ancestor of the IA32 processor family
• The 486 processor, including a cache primer
• The Pentium processor
• The P6 roadmap, P6 processor core, and P6 FSB
• The Pentium Pro processor, including the Microcode Update feature
• The Pentium II and the Pentium II Xeon and Celeron processors
• The Pentium III and the Pentium III Xeon and Celeron processors
• The Pentium 4 processor family
• The Pentium M processor
• Processor identification, System Management Mode, and the IO and Local APICs

An “at-a-glance” table of contents allows readers to quickly find topics ranging from 386 Demand Mode Paging to Pentium 4 CPU Arbitration.

The accompanying CD-ROM contains 16 extra chapters.

Whether you design software or hardware or are responsible for system maintenance or customer support, The Unabridged Pentium 4 will prove an invaluable reference to the world’s most widely used microprocessor chips.

MindShare’s PC System Architecture series is a crisply written and comprehensive set of guides to the most important PC hardware standards. Books in the series are intended for use by hardware and software designers, programmers, and support personnel.

One of the leading technical training companies in the hardware industry, MindShare, Inc., provides innovative courses for dozens of companies, including HP, AMD, IBM, and Compaq. Through these classes and by writing the highly regarded PC System Architecture Series for Addison-Wesley, MindShare trainers emphasize the relationships of hardware subsystems to each other as well as the relationship between software and hardware.

032124656XB09152004

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Product Details

• Paperback: 1744 pages
• Publisher: Addison-Wesley Professional (August 5, 2004)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 032124656X
• ISBN-13: 978-0321246561
• Product Dimensions: 9.1 x 7.4 x 2.5 inches
• Shipping Weight: 5.6 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (2 customer reviews)
• Amazon.com Sales Rank: #713,176 in Books (See Bestsellers in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

12 of 13 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Value depends on accepting the book's purpose, December 28, 2004

By	Richard Bejtlich "TaoSecurity.com" (Metro Washington, DC) - See all my reviews (TOP 500 REVIEWER)    (REAL NAME)

Page 1 of 'The Unabridged Pentium 4' (TUP4) claims 'there is real value in understanding how the architecture has grown over the years,' where the 'architecture' is the IA-32 register set, instruction set, and software exceptions. If you accept this premise, you will find TUP4 to be a valuable book. If you are looking for detail on the lowest-level of programming on IA-32, you should download Intel's free IA-32 Intel Architecture Software Developer s Manual.

Readers looking for information on IA-32 architecture can first turn to three free books Intel provides in .pdf format: Volume 1: Basic Architecture (448 pp); Volumes 2A (580 pp) & 2B (416 pp): Instruction Set Reference; and Volume 3: System Programming Guide (838 pp), for a total of 2282 pp. Volume 1 describes the basic architecture and programming environment of an IA-32 processor. Volumes 2A & 2B are aimed at application programmers and describe the instruction set of the processor and the opcode structure. Volume 3, for OS engineers and BIOS designers, describes the OS support environment of an IA-32 processor and IA-32 processor compatibility information.

TUP4 differs from these volumes in that TUP4 describes Intel processors from a historical and evolutionary standpoint. Although TUP4 has 'Pentium 4' in its title, it begins with the 386 CPU and even makes comparison to 286 and prior CPUs. TUP4 'builds' the P4 by beginning with the 386 and adding features over time. I found this approach helpful to explain why Intel has ended up with the architecture in the P4.

The book's descriptions tend to be thorough and detailed. For example, there are explanations of the state of every element of a CPU upon a system reset, bit-oriented descriptions of registers and memory structures, and electrical characteristics of components like the Front Side Bus.

TUP4 is also interesting because the author is not an Intel employee. This leaves him free to mention items like the fact that the original (and presumably existing) Pentium M CPU is based on the PIII core, and not the newer P4.

Reader should not ignore the additional 342 pages found on the book's CD-ROM. I found the first three chapters most interesting, as they describe processor problems and solutions (ch 1), register (ch 2) and instruction set (ch 3) evolution; the remainder covers aspects of the P6 core.

I have a few concerns with TUP4. First, the quality of most of the figures and diagrams needs to be improved. While legible, they look like they were pulled from slides used in the author's classes, and did not survive publication at high resolution. Second, I think the book could have been thinner. While not exactly a 'large font' book, I saw too much white space and repetition of material. The book had 89 pages (lxxxix) of introduction to handle the table of contents, etc! Third and most importantly, I did not get enough of an introduction to certain CPU concepts and elements. In a 1600+ page book, I would have put more tables and similar references on the CD-ROM, and more basic CPU hardware explanation in the text.

While I am not technically proficient enough in CPU design to critique the book's content, I found one remark odd. On p 209 the author states that a hypothetical system with 256 MB RAM would be 'ridiculously small,' and that it would be 'amazing' if an OS would occupy 250 MB or memory or less. Most consumer PCs ship with 128 MB RAM (admittedly too little in my opinion), so 256 MB is a good standard for modern Windows systems. I am not sure why the author selected his figures, for they do not seem representative of modern computing.

Overall, I strongly recommend anyone wanting to learn more about the IA-32 architecture first download and peruse Intel's three volumes. I am fairly sure those documents will answer your questions. If you want a more comparative discussion, with the 386, 486, Pentium, and later processors explained, give TUP4 a look. For future editions, I would pare the book down by moving more reference material to the CD-ROM, and call the book 'Abridged.'

15 of 19 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Possibly a definitive manual of the P4?, September 23, 2004

By	W Boudville (Terra, Sol 3) - See all my reviews (TOP 10 REVIEWER)    (REAL NAME)

Well should the title say Unabridged. It would not go nicely for you to drop this 1633 page tome on your feet!

The book is aimed squarely at a traditional electrical engineering hardware person. Who hopefully already has extensive experience in designing a chipset or motherboard around a microprocessor. Where, needless to say, it would be even more advantageous if that cpu was an earlier Pentium or x86.

A lot of familiar type material here. The details are specific to this latest cpu, of course. But you should been well conversant with state transition diagrams for various pins on a chip, as functions of input signals on other pins. The book also has many details like setup and hold time requirements for how long a signal must be stable at a pin, relative to some other parameter, like the edge of a clock cycle. These ideas have been around for decades. So it is nice that what you might have learnt in the 70s and 80s are still applicable here, albeit at much higher clock speeds.

The book is a reference manual, in case you haven't figured that out already. I cannot imagine someone reading this cover to cover. It also shows that the company, Mindshare, that authored the book (and similar others), has chosen to reside in a very specialised niche. Where the sheer complexity may deter competition.