'Andrew Chien's book connects the dots from interdependent architectural choices to underlying calculus of performance and in the process strikes a balance between high-level view of the machine and its realizations. It is essential that users of these tools have an intimate understanding of the principles and mechanisms that make computing machines deliver efficient and high performance without becoming hardware designers themselves. The book provides such insights through its succinctly stated principles that both educate and enlighten about fundamental abstractions in computing.' Rajesh Gupta, Professor of Computer Science and Engineering, University of California, San Diego
Preface; 1. Computing and the transformation of society; 2. Instruction sets, software, and instruction execution; 3. Processors: small is fast and scaling; 4. Sequential abstraction, but parallel implementation; 5. Memories: exploiting dynamic locality; 6. The general-purpose computer; 7. Beyond sequential: parallelism in multi-core and the Cloud; 8. Accelerators: customized architectures for performance; 9. Computing performance: past, present, and future; References, Index.