CS 208: Computer Organization and Architecture
Readings: byte order, floating point numbers, and digital logic for multiplication
This week (week 5 of the term), we'll look at a miscellany of important and
interesting topics before diving
into the heart of the course (Chapter 4: The Processor) during week 6.
Here's a list of readings that will help introduce you to this week's topics, in
the order in which we'll examine them, roughly one topic per class day.
- There's a weird and important concept called "byte order" or "endianness" that
well-educated programmers and computer scientists need to know about. In some
sense, it's trivial, but it has wide-spread implications for the functioning of
computer systems. The
Wikipedia entry on Endianness
is a fine starting place. It's also worth reading the famous paper on the topic
(which adopted the terminology "endianness"): Danny Cohen's
On Holy Wars and a Plea for Peace.
(That link to Cohen's paper lacks the pictures that appeared on initial publication.
Here's a bad scan
if you want to see them.) Finally, to get the full flavor of the topic, you might
want to read Jonathan Swift's Gulliver's Travels.
- Read Section 3.3 of Patterson and Hennessy, on Multiplication.
- Read Section 3.5 of Patterson and Hennessy, on Floating Point.