A book about computer architecture ?

[BurakCanik]

Hello my fellow chilizens,

I want to learn more about the inner workings of a computer, you know how cpu's work, instruction pipelines etc. Because I figured If you need to optimize a game then you need to have a solid understanding about how a cpu works (duh!). Anyways what should be the course taken here ? Are there any online tutorials/sites about the subject that is comprehensive. Or do you guys know any books about the subject ?

[BurakCanik]

By the way I found this on amazon :
"The Elements of Computing Systems: Building a Modern Computer from First Principles" by Noam Nisan & Shimon Shocken. It has positive reviews. What do you guys think ?

[cameron]

Did a little bit of looking and it seems like a decent book if you are at the beginner level of understanding computing systems and to computer science in general. I have not taken such a course. All in all a course/book like this would be handy to have and read through. Just flipping through the pages you will probably be going over a bit of information you already know, but you can't go wrong with more knowledge .

I have done a ton of research and tests for optimization in c++. In many cases you can optimize the speed of WELL written code by about 2-3X. However, in some the performance is negligible. I have been able to achieve this when I didn't even think it was possible. I can't speak the same for directx pipeline as I haven't really gotten deep into that. I will post my findings if anyone is curious. I may even make a detailed post here.

[albinopapa]

Depending on what you are specifically wanting to do, a book on writing assembly code might be more to the point. Writing assembly for x86/x64 processors, or ARM or other processors is as close to "cutting the fat" as you can get once you get the experience and understand the commands. I like cameron haven't researched "this" path because I don't plan on getting that "close to the metal" as it were.

[BurakCanik]

You're right albinopapa. So let me clarify : I was studying directX as usual. Then I saw a "thing" in a shader code like this :

[unroll]
for( ... )
{
...
}

( I couldn't use

Code: Select all

because then the underlining and bolding wouldn't work, so sorry about this. )

Then I researched it and absolutely didn't understand anything. Next thing I know I'm reading wikipedia pages one after another, about topics like instruction pipelines, branch predication etc. So that was my concern.

Also cameron that book is more of a beginner book I know. I'm open to suggestions Also I'd love to hear about your optimization research. Actually I'm sure everybody would Also I know I say also a lot so yeah.

[LoveXNA]

perhaps these books can help :
http://www.amazon.com/Modern-X86-Assemb ... 484200659/
Publisher: Apress; 1 edition (November 25, 2014) Very nice !

And
http://www.amazon.com/X86-Assembly-Lang ... 466568240/
Looks promising

[BurakCanik]

The first book you recommended (Modern X86 Assembly Language Programming: 32-bit, 64-bit, SSE, and AVX) seems nice. I'll do some research about this book but I think this fits my purposes. Thanks LoveXNA!

[Clodi]

"The Elements of Computing Systems: Building a Modern Computer from First Principles"

I own that book. It's incredible.
Haven't actually read it yet but will soon.

[PutPixel255]

http://webcast.berkeley.edu/playlist#c, ... urdT_-Nqi1

As comprehensive as it gets until the next course. Reading books expends too much effort on the glossies so I just watch videos. Currently I'm into signal processing.
They may have a newer course in a week or so. Whenever winter 15 starts up.

http://www.amazon.com/Black-Video-Game- ... 0672328208
This was the last book I read on the subject. 2005
Until they develop stem cell research for my eyes ,but that's getting off topic.

[chili]

How low down do you want to go? If you want to fully understand what makes up a cpu, you should study a book on microelectronic circuit design, semiconductor fabrication and layout, one on digital logic design, then learn a simple scalar architecture like the 6502, then maybe 8086 ~ 80486, then start learning about superscalar features such as pipelining, branch prediction, and advanced caching.

If you just want to write faster code then a lot of that will be superfluous, most of what you would need to know would be covered in a good book on assembly for your architecture of choice.