The fifth edition of Computer Organization and Design-winner of a 2014 Textbook Excellence Award (Texty) from The Text and Academic Authors Association-moves forward into the post-PC era with new examples, exercises, and material highlighting the emergence of mobile computing and the cloud. This generational change is emphasized and explored with updated content featuring tablet computers, cloud infrastructure, and the ARM (mobile computing devices) and x86 (cloud computing) architectures.
Because an understanding of modern hardware is essential to achieving good performance and energy efficiency, this edition adds a new concrete example, "Going Faster," used throughout the text to demonstrate extremely effective optimization techniques. Also new to this edition is discussion of the "Eight Great Ideas" of computer architecture.
As with previous editions, a MIPS processor is the core used to present the fundamentals of hardware technologies, assembly language, computer arithmetic, pipelining, memory hierarchies and I/O.
Instructors looking for fourth edition teaching materials should e-mail textbook@elsevier.com.