Computer Architecture and Implementation

International Journal of Electrical Engineering Education, Oct 2001 by Evans, Gareth

Harvey Cragon, Computer Architecture and Implementation, Cambridge University Press, 2000, 318 pp., L24.95; US$44.95.

In his preface Professor Cragon states that this book is intended for use `in a one-- semester, upper-division undergraduate course'. He adds that the prerequisites are courses in logic design with state machines and assembly language programming' and further states that courses in data structures and basic operating systems would be helpful. Given these prerequisites, this book is highly suited to an interesting and academically satisfying one-semester course. However, this book `takes no prisoners' and readers who are not sufficiently well primed will struggle with some of the material.

The book starts with an introductory chapter that provides a detailed overview of the von Neumann machine and includes detailed information on its architecture and its instruction set. Professor Cragon argues that 'a thorough understanding of the von Neumann architecture is a good starting point for a general study of computer architecture' and will no doubt be applauded by those who feet that a historical perspective has an important role to play in considering modern architectures. The second chapter considers performance models and evaluation in some detail and the models are used in later chapters when different architectural approaches are evaluated.

Chapters three and four are the longest in the book and discuss User Instruction Set Design and Memory Systems, respectively. The material is well presented and the coverage is detailed and rigorous. Topics in Chapter 3 include Instruction Set Architecture (with examples from a number of processors including the IBM 360, Pentium, and the MIPSR200), a comparison between RISC and CISC architectures, instruction statistics (dynamic and static), and a detailed discussion of arithmetic including an excellent section on floating point arithmetic. Chapter 4 has sections that include paged virtual memory, cache organisation, various memory organisations and disks.

Chapter 5 gives an overview of datapath organisation and presents some detailed examples with a number of appropriate quantitative examples. Chapter 6 provides an overview of pipelined processors with again a number of well-chosen quantitative examples and includes details of superscalar pipelines. Chapter 7 considers input and output and Chapter 8 considers extensions to instruction set architectures to support kernels, virtual memory, interrupts, input/output, caches and multiprocessor support.

Overall the book is well written and contains a number of well-chosen examples. Each chapter has a number of exercise questions. Overall the book represents excellent value for money. There are larger books that contain rather more detailed examples, but instructors would be pushed to cover the material in a single-semester course. My reservations are few. The first, that the book requires significant prior knowledge, is handled by Professor Cragon's preface notes, which explicitly state the prerequisites. If these are not met, it is my opinion that readers may well struggle. Secondly, the publishers have chosen to use a different font for the worked examples. This has the advantage of making them stand out from the general text, but the font chosen seems to cause inappropriate breaks in words.

Gareth Evans UMIST