StudyFirst Reading Assignment for the Berekeley Machine Structures webcast.
Book: Computer Organization And Design - Patterson & HennesseyJust one chapter... that's 67 pages of technical jargon. The book is widely used and recommended, but it throws a bunch of technical terms out and a whole bunch of references to future chapters. The big picture of each section is pretty clear but there's enough jargon and statistics to make anyone looking to take good notes annoyed. Then again, without skipping through hardware substructures names and specifics when explaining growth, it would be like any other book.
The first chapter essentially goes over what was said in the first lecture. The growth in processor speed is due to advances in the integrated circuit and its popularity increased when it became easier to program. See the Wikipedia article on the history of computer hardware and Moore's Law.
This chapter gets really complicated explaining the job of the computer designer to make the most efficient but cost effective computer. See the wikipedia articles on computer architecture and computer hardware.
Before Computer Architechture referred only to instruction set design, and other stuff was called just implementation, incorrectly. Instruction set architechture actually refers to the programmer visible instruction set, which serves as a boundary between the software and hardware. Organization includes the high level aspects of a computer design like memory, the bus struction and the cpu where arithmetic, logic, branching, and data transfer are implemented.
SPARCstation-2 and SPARCstation-20 are two different organizations with the same architecture.
What's the computer for
| Funcational Requirements | Typically Supported |
| General Purpose | Blanace performance tasks |
| Scientific | Fast floating point opperations |
| Commercial | COBOL/Databasing support |
Existing software that can be installed in that machine.
| At programming language | Easiest for designers |
| Object code/binary compat | No flexibility but no investment in new software or porting old programs |
| Size of address space | May limit application |
| Memory Management | Required for modern OS, paged vs segmented |
| Protection | paged vs segmented protection |
| Floating point | Arithmetic format standardized by IEEE, DEC, or IBM |
| I/O bus | For I/O devices |
| Operating Systems | Unix vs dos |
| Networks | Networks like Ethernet or ATM |
| Programming Languages | ANSI C Fortran 77 ANSI COBOL |
Again, I guess this is supposed to be an overview because it goes very fist and throws out many terms. It's just emphasize all the variables to take into consideration that the computer manufacturers have to take in mind when marketting their computer to a targetted group. The other key point it makes is that the computer architecture must be so well efficiently organized that it can last the test of time.
The amount of memory consumed by programs has increased at a rapid rate. High level programming languages replaced assembly.
Designers sometimes design with the next big technology in mind. The implementation technique is important because it can enable the designers to be able to use a newer more cost effective technology.
Technology changes affecting cost has been a major theme in computer history. The learning curve drives prices lower and is measured by the Yield of the product. It goes on to talk about the economics of computer parts and packages sales. The volume of available merchandise helps drive down the cost and provide availability. Commodities allow for market competition and lowers the buying price for the consumers.
It uses kind of confusing terms to look up like "die" and "wafer" when referring to the integrated circuit. As far as I saw it hadn't explained these in the book. Here's a wikipedia quote:
| pie X (wafer diameter/2)^2 Die Area | − | pie X wafer diameter √(2 X Die Area) |
It goes on to give examples of the forumals.
It goes on to talk about the cost of each part of the computer by percentage of the package value. It seems outdated, listing processor as 6% of the cost and the dram at 36%. I'm not going to read into this more. I don't care about the statistics for computer costs in 1993, and I'm not interested in an overview of basic economics from my computer book. Lowest cost, high performance, it shouldn't repeat it every chapter.
The book goes on to list many of the benchmark tests that are part of the SPEC92 Benchmark suites. Many listed there are linked on the benchmark repository site of open source programs. The book lists fortran and C programs ranging from 500 - 83000 lines of code. The first 6 are integer oriented and the bottom 14 are floating point oriented benchmarks.
The results must be reproducible but sometimes computer journals don't leave enough information for other people to reproduce their results. The SPEC benchmark report is more standardized and allows people to reproduce the results.
The book shows another example of what a SPECfp92 benchmark test looks like. There's two columns, one saying the hardware specs and the other saying what software it is running. The bottom says the flags, or I guess commend line arguments? they used with their fortran and C programs.
The book shows a chart showing that one computer runs way faster for one program, while running much slower for another. It shows a basic way of mathematically comparing the relative performance among multiple benchmark tests. It takes the total execution time and produces an mean, or harmonic mean depending on if the benchmark is a rate.
I highly recommend reading wikipedia's page on piplining rather than the books mess of diagrams and mathematical formulas.
The rest has more mathematics and old terminology than I'm willing to try and understand. My mathematics isn't all that strong. I rather head to the wikipedia page on benchmarks for generalizations than spend time studying old standards and forumulas. Now days it seems like more processing power means more overkill for demanding graphical games. Large server networks of course would benefit infinitely, but for me, the computers have been well fast enough not to lose hair over for the last couple of years.
Maybe I'll get the motivation another day. As much as I want to go though the machine structures course doing all homeworks and taking careful notes, this seems highly irrelevant to what I've seen so far in the video lectures. For now its all to frustrating, and I'm totally not interested in the content of the pages.
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