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Computer Organization and Design: The Hardware/Software Interface, Third Edition (The Morgan Kaufmann Series in Computer Architecture and Design) (The ... Series in Computer Architecture and Design) | 
 enlarge | Authors: David A. Patterson, John L. Hennessy, Peter J. Ashenden, James R. Larus, Daniel J. Sorin
Publisher: Morgan Kaufmann
Category: Book
List Price: $64.95
Buy Used: $17.78
You Save: $47.17 (73%)
New (9) Used (28) from $17.78
Avg. Customer Rating:  32 reviews
Sales Rank: 18609
Media: Paperback
Edition: 3
Number Of Items: 1
Pages: 656
Shipping Weight (lbs): 3
Dimensions (in): 9 x 8 x 1.1
ISBN: 1558606041
Dewey Decimal Number: 004.22
EAN: 9781558606043
ASIN: 1558606041
Publication Date: August 2, 2004
Availability: Usually ships in 1-2 business days
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Product Description
This best selling text on computer organization has been thoroughly updated to reflect the newest technologies. Examples highlight the latest processor designs, benchmarking standards, languages and tools. As with previous editions, a MIPs processor is the core used to present the fundamentals of hardware technologies at work in a computer system. The book presents an entire MIPS instruction setinstruction by instructionthe fundamentals of assembly language, computer arithmetic, pipelining, memory hierarchies and I/O. A new aspect of the third edition is the explicit connection between program performance and CPU performance. The authors show how hardware and software components--such as the specific algorithm, programming language, compiler, ISA and processor implementation--impact program performance. Throughout the book a new feature focusing on program performance describes how to search for bottlenecks and improve performance in various parts of the system. The book digs deeper into the hardware/software interface, presenting a complete view of the function of the programming language and compiler--crucial for understanding computer organization. A CD provides a toolkit of simulators and compilers along with tutorials for using them.
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| Customer Reviews: Read 27 more reviews...
 Great job October 23, 2008
this book was very affordable
Shipping was a little slow but the book
Was in great condition as promised thanx man!!
older version is better October 19, 2008
well organize content. however some materials had moved to the CD ROM which is not convenience for study.
recommend getting the older version if possible.
 Uneven, intermediate-level qualitative treatment July 18, 2008
1 out of 1 found this review helpful
The first few chapters are a bit wasted. If this is your first exposure to computer internals, the material there is densely packed and not so well organized. The authors take a sort of patchy top-down approach to introducing the computer, visiting instructions, high-level languages, compilers, arithmetic, memory addressing, etc. I found a much more coherent and satisfying introduction in Patt's "Introduction to Computing Systems", which starts from transistors and works its way up to C over a whole volume. In all fairness, the authors did include a brief introduction to digital logic in Appendix B.
It's around Chapter 4 that this book really takes off, as the topic shifts to performance and optimization. The explanations are very clear and punctuated with brief, worked-out numerical examples. The discussions of pipelines and memory hierarchy are superb. There are some interesting asides where they compare and contrast the MIPS RISC architecture used throughout the book with Intel's Pentium.
These latter chapters have a certain story-telling quality, with gems of engineering wisdom. It's clear the authors have deep and practical knowledge of their subject. They often revisit the themes of simplicity, measurement and trade-offs as they introduce systems of growing complexity.
Simple, clear introduction June 4, 2008
For anyone who wants to know how simple processing and memory works. IO devices chapter was so thin as to be useless, but the main parts of the book were comprehensive.
Used as a textbook in class, but I will keep it as a reference due to high quality and readability.
Poorly organized and has lots of filling material June 1, 2008
1 out of 1 found this review helpful
The book presents computer architecture around MIPS and supporting hardware organization.
Division of the book into printed material and extra material on CD is a bad choice. One ends up printing the CD material anyway. Especially, it is always good to have a quick digital design review at the beginning of a Computer Organization course. But the review is pushed onto the CD. The authors claim they made this weird choice to keep the the size of the book in check. They could have achieved this easily by adjusting the unnecessarily large typeface used in the book.
They could omit most of their "insight providing" "pits and fallacies" sections. Most of this material can be covered in the standard text. Instead, the authors choose to give common sense arguments a prophetic voice. Along the same lines, they should omit their recurring rant about Intel and how they screwed up the nice RISC architecture the authors helped invent.
The book has editing problems throughout. The diagrams are full of mistakes. There are repeated paragraphs. The text has a poor flow. Some remarks and arguments do not make sense unless the reader is already very familiar with the topic, which is not usually the case for an undergraduate student.
I recommend Parhami's book Computer Architecture: From Microprocessors to Supercomputers (Oxford Series in Electrical and Computer Engineering) instead. This book basically has the same material and it does it right.
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