PREFACE
iii
About the Book
Our goal in writing this book is to expose the inner workings of the moderndigital computer at a level that demystifies what goes on inside the machine.The only prerequisite to
Principles of Computer Architecture
is a workingknowledge of a high-level programming language. The breadth of material hasbeen chosen to cover topics normally found in a first course in computerarchitecture or computer organization. The breadth and depth of coveragehave been steered to also place the beginning student on a solid track for con-tinuing studies in computer related disciplines.In creating a computer architecture textbook, the technical issues fall intoplace fairly naturally, and it is the organizational issues that bring importantfeatures to fruition. Some of the features that received the greatest attention in
Principles of Computer Architecture
include the choice of the instruction setarchitecture (ISA), the use of case studies, and a voluminous use of examplesand exercises.
THE INSTRUCTIONAL ISA
A textbook that covers assembly language programming needs to deal with theissue of which instruction set architecture (ISA) to use: a model architecture,or one of the many commercial architectures. The choice impacts the instruc-tor, who may want an ISA that matches a local platform used for studentassembly language programming assignments. To complicate matters, thelocal platform may change from semester to semester: yesterday the MIPS,today the Pentium, tomorrow the SPARC. The authors opted for having itboth ways by adopting a SPARC-subset for an instructional ISA, called “ARISC Computer” (ARC), which is carried through the mainstream of the
PREFACE
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