Computer Systems (5th Edition )

Specifications

Book Description

The fundamental ideas behind computer organization, assembly language, and computer architecture are broken down in Computer Systems, Fifth Edition in a way that is easy to understand, comprehensive, and procedurally organized. It takes a top-down approach to several levels of abstraction and encourages students to investigate the many facets of computer systems in this manner. Students gain a more holistic understanding of computer systems and the components that make them up as a result of reading a literature that takes the time to investigate the interrelationships between the various levels of abstraction. New and Essential Features: – A whole new high-order language The high-order language will now be written in C rather than C++. Because C is the language that is used most frequently for programming systems, it is the one that is best suited to be used in a book about computer systems. – Brand new sidebars Each of the new sidebars provides a concrete illustration of one of the ideas covered in the corresponding chapter. Since the majority of the chapters focus on describing the Pep/9 virtual machine, the sidebars for those chapters illustrate implementations that correspond to the Intel x86 architecture. – New and expanded topics The following are examples of new and expanded topics: QR codes; color displays; Unicode; UTF-32 and UTF-8 encoding; floating point underflow; big-endian and little-endian order; memory alignment issues; and expanded RISC design principles and MIPS coverage to contrast with the Pep/9 CISC design. – New virtual machine Pep/8, the virtual machine that was used for the two editions that came before this one, has been replaced by Pep/9, which is both new and enhanced. Pep/9 keeps the same eight addressing modes as Pep/8, but it also adds memory-mapped I/O, an enhanced return-from-subroutine instruction, a new native compare-byte instruction, improved instruction mnemonics, and a new hexadecimal output trap instruction. Pep/8 keeps the same eight addressing modes as Pep/9. – Brand new software The Pep/9 system described in the book is supported by two tools, an upgraded assembler/simulator and a CPU simulator, which are both available as open source software.