Computer Organization and Design, Fifth Edition, is the latest update to the classic introduction to computer organization. The text now contains new examples and material highlighting the emergence of mobile computing and the cloud. It explores this generational change with updated content featuring tablet computers, cloud infrastructure, and the ARM (mobile computing devices) and x86 (cloud computing) architectures. The book uses a MIPS processor core to present the fundamentals of hardware technologies, assembly language, computer arithmetic, pipelining, memory hierarchies and I/O.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. There is also a new discussion of the Eight Great Ideas of computer architecture. Parallelism is examined in depth with examples and content highlighting parallel hardware and software topics. The book features the Intel Core i7, ARM Cortex-A8 and NVIDIA Fermi GPU as real-world examples, along with a full set of updated and improved exercises. This new edition is an ideal resource for professional digital system designers, programmers, application developers, and system software developers. It will also be of interest to undergraduate students in Computer Science, Computer Engineering and Electrical Engineering courses in Computer Organization, Computer Design, ranging from Sophomore required courses to Senior Electives.

Author Biography

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 and CRA. John L. Hennessy is the tenth president of Stanford University, where he has been a member of the faculty since 1977 in the departments of electrical engineering and computer science. Hennessy is a Fellow of the IEEE and ACM; a member of the National Academy of Engineering, the National Academy of Science, and the American Philosophical Society; and a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. Among his many awards are the 2001 Eckert-Mauchly Award for his contributions to RISC technology, the 2001 Seymour Cray Computer Engineering Award, and the 2000 John von Neumann Award, which he shared with David Patterson. He has also received seven honorary doctorates.