Inside the Machine: An Illustrated Introduction to Microprocessors and Computer Architecture Read Online Free PDF Page A

familiarity with the concepts and processor designs introduced in the
    chapters prior to it.
    More advanced readers who are already familiar with some of the
    processors covered will find that the individual chapters can stand alone.
    The book’s extensive use of headings and subheadings means that it can
    also be employed as a general reference for the processors described,
    though that is not the purpose for which it was designed.
    The first four chapters of Inside the Machine are dedicated to laying the conceptual groundwork for later chapters’ studies of real-world microprocessors. These chapters use a simplified example processor, the DLW, to
    illustrate basic and intermediate concepts like the instructions/data distinc-
    tion, assembly language programming, superscalar execution, pipelining,
    the programming model, machine language, and so on.
    The middle portion of the book consists of detailed studies of two popular
    desktop processor lines: the Pentium line from Intel and the PowerPC line
    from IBM and Motorola. These chapters walk the reader through the chrono-
    logical development of each processor line, describing the evolution of the
    microarchitectures and instruction set architectures under discussion. Along
    the way, more advanced concepts like speculative execution, vector processing,
    and instruction set translation are introduced and explored via a discussion
    of one or more real-world processors.
    Throughout the middle part of the book, the overall approach is what
    might be called “comparative anatomy,” in which each new processor’s novel
    features are explained in terms of how they differ from analogous features
    found in predecessors and/or competitors. The comparative part of the book
    culminates in Chapters 7 and 8, which consist of detailed comparisons of
    two starkly different and very important processors: Intel’s Pentium 4 and
    Motorola’s MPC7450 (popularly known as the G4e).
    After a brief introduction to 64-bit computing and the 64-bit extensions
    to the popular x 86 instruction set architecture in Chapter 9, the microarchitecture of the first mass-market 64-bit processor, the IBM PowerPC 970, is
    treated in Chapter 10. This study of the 970, the majority of which is also
    directly applicable to IBM’s POWER4 mainframe processor, concludes the
    book’s coverage of PowerPC processors.
    Chapter 11 covers the organization and functioning of the memory
    hierarchy found in almost all modern computers.
    Inside the Machine ’s concluding chapter is given over to an in-depth
    examination of the latest generation of processors from Intel: the Pentium
    M, Core Duo, and Core 2 Duo. This chapter contains the most detailed
    discussion of these processors available online or in print, and it includes
    some new information that has not been publicly released prior to the
    printing of this book.
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    Introduction
    B A S I C C O M P U T I N G C O N C E P T S
    Modern computers come in all shapes and sizes, and
    they aid us in a million different types of tasks ranging
    from the serious, like air traffic control and cancer
    research, to the not-so-serious, like computer gaming
    and photograph retouching. But as diverse as computers are in their
    outward forms and in the uses to which they’re put, they’re all amazingly
    similar in basic function. All of them rely on a limited repertoire of tech-
    nologies that enable them do the myriad kinds of miracles we’ve come to
    expect from them.
    At the heart of the modern computer is the microprocessor —also commonly called the central processing unit (CPU) —a tiny, square sliver of silicon that’s etched with a microscopic network of gates and channels through which
    electricity flows. This network of gates ( transistors ) and channels ( wires or lines ) is a very small version of the kind of circuitry that we’ve all seen when cracking open a television remote or an old radio. In short, the microprocessor isn’t just the “heart” of a modern