Slightly OT: Computer internals book recommendations

Sophie Haskins haskins.sophie at gmail.com
Sun Nov 19 10:14:27 CST 2017


I want to say that earlier editions of “Computer Systems: A Programmers Perspective” had a bunch of discussions of buses etc in addition to assembly, compilers, linking, etc. but the edition I have explicitly calls out that they felt like it wasn’t important to have chapters on anymore :(

> On Nov 19, 2017, at 2:29 AM, Huw Davies via cctalk <cctalk at classiccmp.org> wrote:
> 
> 
> 
>> On 19 Nov 2017, at 10:57, Eric Christopherson via cctalk <cctalk at classiccmp.org> wrote:
>> 
>> Basically, I'm looking for a certain book (although really any book in
>> the same vein would satisfy), which was on computer system architecture,
>> organization, etc.; it talked about the usual boolean logic, assembly
>> programming in some fictitious instruction set, an overview of two
>> actual architectures (I think at that time they were 32-bit x86 and
>> 64-bit POWER). The other thing I remember very specifically was there
>> was a place near the back (probably an appendix) that talked about
>> one or more specific buses (I think at least PCI was there), with timing
>> diagrams to tell you what was actually going back and forth between the
>> bus and CPU.
>> 
> 
> Sounds like either 
> 
> Computer Architecture: A Quantitative Approach by David Patterson and John Hennessy
> 
> Computer Organization and Design: the Hardware/Software Interface by David Patterson and John Hennessy
> 
> I see there’s a MIPS edition of the second book. My copy of the second book has Hennessy as the first author.
> 
> Time for a re-read - it’s been a while since I read both of them.
> 
> Huw Davies           | e-mail: Huw.Davies at kerberos.davies.net.au
> Melbourne            | "If soccer was meant to be played in the
> Australia            | air, the sky would be painted green" 
> 


More information about the cctech mailing list