Modern Computer Architecture and Organization by Jim Ledin

Are you a software developer, systems designer, or computer architecture student looking for a methodical introduction to digital device architectures but overwhelmed by their complexity? This book will help you to learn how modern computer systems work, from the lowest level of transistor switching to the macro view of collaborating multiprocessor servers. You’ll gain unique insights into the internal behavior of processors that execute the code developed in high-level languages and enable you to design more efficient and scalable software systems.

The book will teach you the fundamentals of computer systems including transistors, logic gates, sequential logic, and instruction operations. You will learn details of modern processor architectures and instruction sets including x86, x64, ARM, and RISC-V. You will see how to implement a RISC-V processor in a low-cost FPGA board and how to write a quantum computing program and run it on an actual quantum computer. By the end of this book, you will have a thorough understanding of modern processor and computer architectures and the future directions these architectures are likely to take.

What you will learn
Get to grips with transistor technology and digital circuit principles
Discover the functional elements of computer processors
Understand pipelining and superscalar execution
Work with floating-point data formats
Understand the purpose and operation of the supervisor mode
Implement a complete RISC-V processor in a low-cost FPGA
Explore the techniques used in virtual machine implementation
Write a quantum computing program and run it on a quantum computer
Who this book is for
This book is for software developers, computer engineering students, system designers, reverse engineers, and anyone looking to understand the architecture and design principles underlying modern computer systems from tiny embedded devices to warehouse-size cloud server farms. A general understanding of computer processors is helpful but not required.

Table of Contents
Introducing Computer Architecture
Digital Logic
Processor Elements
Computer System Components
Hardware-Software Interface
Specialized Computing Domains
Processor and Memory Architectures
Performance-Enhancing Techniques
Specialized Processor Extensions
Modern Processor Architectures and Instruction Sets
The RISC-V Architecture and Instruction Set
Processor Virtualization
Domain-Specific Computer Architectures
Future Directions in Computer Architectures