Computer Organization and Architecture: Designing for Performance

by William Stallings and Stallings

Book Overview

For graduate and undergraduate courses in computer science, computer engineering, and electrical engineering Fundamentals of Processor and Computer Design Computer Organization and Architecture is a... This description may be from another edition of this product.

• Format: Hardcover
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0130351199
• ISBN13: 9780130351197
• Release Date: July 2002
• Publisher: Prentice Hall
• Length: 815 Pages
• Weight: 3.10 lbs.
• Dimensions: 1.4" x 7.2" x 9.3"

Customer Reviews

A comprehensive book

This book is really comprehensive and up-to-date. It covers the subject in sufficient details with good examples and illustrations. The main problem of the book is that it is too dry and not very easy to read.

A great book.

A good book to get started with the fundamentals of computer organization and architecture. The author keeps us up-to-date with the state of the art developments in the area. I recommend it for a text book or a handy reference.

excellent text

This is an excellent text that I'm using in a junior-level computer architecture course. It covers popular modern architectural and microarchitectural techniques (e.g., register renaming and predicated instructions) in detail suitable to undergraduates - while not focusing on a particular instruction set as in some other undergraduate texts. It provides excellent coverage of memory hierarchies. Aspects of the IA-64, PowerPC, SPARC, and x86 architectures are used as examples. Lucid and well written - it is well suited for self-study.

Explains a large topic area quite well.

I was surprised by some of the low ratings of this book. Overall, it is clearly written and the graphics are very helpful to understanding the material. Some coverage at the logic gate level would be useful in future editions - I ended up surfing the web for this information. All in all, this is a good text for a CompSci course. However, it would be difficult to recommend it for self-study unless the reader is already comfortable with technical material.

This is a very easy to understand book

This book doesn't contain any logic gate level designs but covers general computer organisation issues thoroughly. It is only 670 pages approximately and covers instruction set design, CPU structure (ALU + control unit), I/O (such as SCSI, FireWire and RAID), Bus systems (PCI, Futurebus+) and operating systems etc. There are numerous comparisons made between Intel Pentium and PowerPC. It is a good book to start with a very good bibliography for more detailed books on each chapter's subject.