文档介绍：1 Fundamentals puter Design
And now for pletely different.
Monty Python’s Flying Circus
Introduction 1
The Task of puter Designer 4
Technology Trends 11
Cost, Price and their Trends 14
Measuring and Reporting Performance 25
Quantitative Principles puter Design 40
Putting It All Together: Performance and Price-Performance 49
Another View: Power Consumption and Efficiency as the Metric 58
Fallacies and Pitfalls 59
Concluding Remarks 69
Historical Perspective and References 70
Exercises 77
Introduction
Computer technology has made incredible progress in the roughly 55 years since
the first general-purpose puter was created. Today, less than a
thousand dollars will purchase a puter that has more performance,
more main memory, and more disk storage than puter bought in 1980 for
$1 million. This rapid rate of improvement e both from advances in the
technology used to puters and from innovation puter design.
Although technological improvements have been fairly steady, progress aris-
ing from puter architectures has been much less consistent. During the
first 25 years of puters, both forces made a major contribution; but
beginning in about 1970, computer designers became largely dependent upon in-
tegrated circuit technology. During the 1970s, performance continued to improve
at about 25% to 30% per year for the mainframes and puters that domi-
nated the industry.
The late 1970s saw the emergence of the microprocessor. The ability of the
microprocessor to ride the improvements in integrated circuit technology more
closely than the less integrated mainframes and puters led to a higher
rate of improvement—roughly 35% growth per year in performance.
2 Chapter 1 Fundamentals puter Design
This growth rate, combined with the cost advantages of a mass-produced
microprocessor, led to an increasing fraction of puter business being
based on microprocessors. In additi