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The Bargain Nexus - Computer Organization and Design: The Hardware/Software Interface. Third Edition, Revised
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List Price: $64.95
Our Price: $43.96
Your Save: $ 20.99 ( 32% )
Availability: Usually ships in 24 hours
Manufacturer: Morgan Kaufmann
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Average Customer Rating:  
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Binding: Paperback
Dewey Decimal Number: 004
EAN: 9780123706065
ISBN: 0123706068
Label: Morgan Kaufmann
Manufacturer: Morgan Kaufmann
Number Of Items: 1
Number Of Pages: 621
Publication Date: 2007-06-01
Publisher: Morgan Kaufmann
Studio: Morgan Kaufmann
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Spotlight customer reviews:
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Customer Rating:
Summary: Great job
Comment: this book was very affordable
Shipping was a little slow but the book
Was in great condition as promised thanx man!!
Customer Rating:
Summary: older version is better
Comment: well organize content. however some materials had moved to the CD ROM which is not convenience for study.
recommend getting the older version if possible.
Customer Rating:
Summary: Uneven, intermediate-level qualitative treatment
Comment: The first few chapters are a bit wasted. If this is your first exposure to computer internals, the material there is densely packed and not so well organized. The authors take a sort of patchy top-down approach to introducing the computer, visiting instructions, high-level languages, compilers, arithmetic, memory addressing, etc. I found a much more coherent and satisfying introduction in Patt's "Introduction to Computing Systems", which starts from transistors and works its way up to C over a whole volume. In all fairness, the authors did include a brief introduction to digital logic in Appendix B.
It's around Chapter 4 that this book really takes off, as the topic shifts to performance and optimization. The explanations are very clear and punctuated with brief, worked-out numerical examples. The discussions of pipelines and memory hierarchy are superb. There are some interesting asides where they compare and contrast the MIPS RISC architecture used throughout the book with Intel's Pentium.
These latter chapters have a certain story-telling quality, with gems of engineering wisdom. It's clear the authors have deep and practical knowledge of their subject. They often revisit the themes of simplicity, measurement and trade-offs as they introduce systems of growing complexity.
Customer Rating:
Summary: Simple, clear introduction
Comment: For anyone who wants to know how simple processing and memory works. IO devices chapter was so thin as to be useless, but the main parts of the book were comprehensive.
Used as a textbook in class, but I will keep it as a reference due to high quality and readability.
Customer Rating:
Summary: Poorly organized and has lots of filling material
Comment: The book presents computer architecture around MIPS and supporting hardware organization.
Division of the book into printed material and extra material on CD is a bad choice. One ends up printing the CD material anyway. Especially, it is always good to have a quick digital design review at the beginning of a Computer Organization course. But the review is pushed onto the CD. The authors claim they made this weird choice to keep the the size of the book in check. They could have achieved this easily by adjusting the unnecessarily large typeface used in the book.
They could omit most of their "insight providing" "pits and fallacies" sections. Most of this material can be covered in the standard text. Instead, the authors choose to give common sense arguments a prophetic voice. Along the same lines, they should omit their recurring rant about Intel and how they screwed up the nice RISC architecture the authors helped invent.
The book has editing problems throughout. The diagrams are full of mistakes. There are repeated paragraphs. The text has a poor flow. Some remarks and arguments do not make sense unless the reader is already very familiar with the topic, which is not usually the case for an undergraduate student.
I recommend Parhami's book Computer Architecture: From Microprocessors to Supercomputers (Oxford Series in Electrical and Computer Engineering) instead. This book basically has the same material and it does it right.
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Editorial Reviews:
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What's New in the Third Edition, Revised Printing
The same great book gets better! This revised printing features all of the original content along with these additional features:
. Appendix A (Assemblers, Linkers, and the SPIM Simulator) has been moved from the CD-ROM into the printed book
. Corrections and bug fixes
Third Edition features
New pedagogical features
. Understanding Program Performance
- Analyzes key performance issues from the programmer's perspective
. Check Yourself Questions
- Helps students assess their understanding of key points of a section
. Computers In the Real World
- Illustrates the diversity of applications of computing technology beyond traditional desktop and servers
. For More Practice
- Provides students with additional problems they can tackle
. In More Depth
- Presents new information and challenging exercises for the advanced student
New reference features
. Highlighted glossary terms and definitions appear on the book page, as bold-faced entries in the index, and as a separate and searchable reference on the CD.
. A complete index of the material in the book and on the CD appears in the printed index and the CD includes a fully searchable version of the same index.
. Historical Perspectives and Further Readings have been updated and expanded to include the history of software R&D.
. CD-Library provides materials collected from the web which directly support the text.
In addition to thoroughly updating every aspect of the text to reflect the most current computing technology, the third edition
. Uses standard 32-bit MIPS 32 as the primary teaching ISA.
. Presents the assembler-to-HLL translations in both C and Java.
. Highlights the latest developments in architecture in Real Stuff sections:
- Intel IA-32
- Power PC 604
- Google's PC cluster
- Pentium P4
- SPEC CPU2000 benchmark suite for processors
- SPEC Web99 benchmark for web servers
- EEMBC benchmark for embedded systems
- AMD Opteron memory hierarchy
- AMD vs. 1A-64
New support for distinct course goals
Many of the adopters who have used our book throughout its two editions are refining their courses with a greater hardware or software focus. We have provided new material to support these course goals:
New material to support a Hardware Focus
. Using logic design conventions
. Designing with hardware description languages
. Advanced pipelining
. Designing with FPGAs
. HDL simulators and tutorials
. Xilinx CAD tools
New material to support a Software Focus
. How compilers work
. How to optimize compilers
. How to implement object oriented languages
. MIPS simulator and tutorial
. History sections on programming languages, compilers, operating systems and databases
On the CD
. NEW: Search function to search for content on both the CD-ROM and the printed text
. CD-Bars: Full length sections that are introduced in the book and presented on the CD
. CD-Appendixes: Appendices B-D
. CD-Library: Materials collected from the web which directly support the text
. CD-Exercises: For More Practice provides exercises and solutions for self-study
. In More Depth presents new information and challenging exercises for the advanced or curious student
. Glossary: Terms that are defined in the text are collected in this searchable reference
. Further Reading: References are organized by the chapter they support
. Software: HDL simulators, MIPS simulators, and FPGA design tools
. Tutorials: SPIM, Verilog, and VHDL
. Additional Support: Processor Models, Labs, Homeworks, Index covering the book and CD contents
Instructor Support
Instructor support provided on textbooks.elsevier.com:
. Solutions to all the exercises
. Figures from the book in a number of formats
. Lecture slides prepared by the authors and other instructors
. Lecture notes
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