Computer Organisation and Architecture: Evolutionary Concepts, Principles, and Designs

Computer organization and architecture is becoming an increasingly important core subject in the areas of computer science and its applications, and information technology that constantly steers the relentless revolution going on in this discipline. This text book demystifies the state-of-the-art using a simple and step-by-step development from traditionally fundamentals to most advanced concepts entwined with this subject maintaining a reasonable balance among various theoretical principles, numerous design approaches, and their actual practical implementations. Being driven by the diversified knowledge gained directly from working in the constantly changing environment in information technology (IT) industry, the author, however, sets the stage by describing the modern issues in different areas of this subject, and continues to effectively provide a comprehensive source of material with exciting new developments, using a wealth of concrete examples relating to recent regulatory changes in the modern design and architecture of different categories of computer systems associated with real-life instances as case studies, ranging from micro to mini, supermini, mainframes, cluster architectures, massively parallel processing systems (MPP), and even supercomputers with commodity processors. Many of the topics that are briefly discussed in the text to conserve space for new materials, however, are elaborately described from design perspective to ultimate practical implementations with representative schematic diagrams available through the book website.

Key Features

• The book website contains an exhaustive material with respective figures relating to the entire text to illustrate many of the computer design, organization and architecture issues with examples.
• Microprocessor evolutions and its chronological improvements with illustrations taking both Intel and Motorola families.
• Multicore concept and subsequent multicore processors; a new standard in processor design.
• Cluster architecture; a vibrant organizational and architectural development in building up massively distributed /parallel systems.
• InfiniBand, a high-speed link for use in cluster system architecture providing a single--system image.
• FireWire, a high-speed serial bus used for both isochronous real-time data transfer and asynchronous applications, especially needed in multimedia and mobile phones.
• Evolution of embedded systems and its specific characteristics.
• Real-time systems and their major design issues in brief.
• Improved main memory technologies with its recent releases of DDR2 and subsequently DDR3, Rambus DRAM, and Cache DRAM, widely used in all types of modern systems including large clusters and high-end servers.
• DVD optical disks and flash drive (Pen drive).
• RAID, a common approach to configure multiple-disk arrangement used in server-based large systems.
• A good number of problems along with their solutions on different topics after their delivery.

This book serves as a textbook for graduate level courses for computer science engineering, information technology, electrical engineering, electronics engineering, computer science, BCA, MCA, and also for similar other courses.