Computer Organization and Design

The fifth edition of Computer Organization and Design-winner of a 2014 Textbook Excellence Award (Texty) from The Text and Academic Authors Association-moves forward into the post-PC era with new examples, exercises, and material highlighting the emergence of mobile computing and the cloud. This generational change is emphasized and explored with updated content featuring tablet computers, cloud infrastructure, and the ARM (mobile computing devices) and x86 (cloud computing) architectures.

Because an understanding of modern hardware is essential to achieving good performance and energy efficiency, this edition adds a new concrete example, 'Going Faster,' used throughout the text to demonstrate extremely effective optimization techniques. Also new to this edition is discussion of the 'Eight Great Ideas' of computer architecture.

As with previous editions, a MIPS processor is the core used to present the fundamentals of hardware technologies, assembly language, computer arithmetic, pipelining, memory hierarchies and I/O.

Instructors looking for fourth edition teaching materials should e-mail textbook@elsevier.com.

• Winner of a 2014 Texty Award from the Text and Academic Authors Association
• Includes new examples, exercises, and material highlighting the emergence of mobile computing and the cloud
• Covers parallelism in depth with examples and content highlighting parallel hardware and software topics
• Features the Intel Core i7, ARM Cortex-A8 and NVIDIA Fermi GPU as real-world examples throughout the book
• Adds a new concrete example, 'Going Faster,' to demonstrate how understanding hardware can inspire software optimizations that improve performance by 200 times
• Discusses and highlights the 'Eight Great Ideas' of computer architecture:  Performance via Parallelism; Performance via Pipelining; Performance via Prediction; Design for Moore's Law; Hierarchy of Memories; Abstraction to Simplify Design; Make the Common Case Fast;  and Dependability via Redundancy
• Includes a full set of updated and improved exercises

David A. Patterson has been teaching computer architecture at the University of California, Berkeley, since joining the faculty in 1977, where he holds the Pardee Chair of Computer Science. His teaching has been honored by the Distinguished Teaching Award from the University of California, the Karlstrom Award from ACM, and the Mulligan Education Medal and Undergraduate Teaching Award from IEEE. Patterson received the IEEE Technical Achievement Award and the ACM Eckert-Mauchly Award for contributions to RISC, and he shared the IEEE Johnson Information Storage Award for contributions to RAID. He also shared the IEEE John von Neumann Medal and the C & C Prize with John Hennessy. Like his co-author, Patterson is a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, the Computer History Museum, ACM, and IEEE, and he was elected to the National Academy of Engineering, the National Academy of Sciences, and the Silicon Valley Engineering Hall of Fame. He served on the Information Technology Advisory Committee to the U.S. President, as chair of the CS division in the Berkeley EECS department, as chair of the Computing Research Association, and as President of ACM. This record led to Distinguished Service Awards from ACM, CRA, and SIGARCH.