The Design and Analysis of Instruction Set Processors

This book is designed to present the student with a computer description notation, ISP, and a methodology for the analysis of computer architectures. The overall motivation is to present the space of architecture features spanned by a collection of representative machines rather than presenting yet another paper machine, designed solely for pedagogical reasons. Each chapter of this book is meant to illustrate some aspect of the architecture space. Each feature is presented and discussed in terms of the same set of machines. The student is assumed to have some background in digital logic, assembly language programming, numeric representation in different bases and conversion between bases.