Ideal for undergraduate courses in computer organization, assembly language programming, and computer architecture, An Assembly Language Introduction to Computer Architecture: Using the Intel Pentium introduces students to the fundamentals of computer architecture from a programmer's perspective by teaching them assembly language, the interface between hardware and software. Designed for students in computer science and engineering who have taken one high-level language programming course, it uses a top-down approach, introducing an abstract (registerless) assembly language first. This approach enables students to build on previous knowledge and allows them to write programs from the beginning of the course. Topics covered include basic computer organization, data representation, data structures, the assembly process, exception handling, and more. Examples are developed using the very popular Intel Pentium architecture; however, the concepts covered are valid with any system. This accessible text is supplemented with a helpful website (http://www.cs.wisc.edu/~smoler/x86text.html) that contains macros to use with programming tools, lecture notes to accompany the text, sample programs, and other useful items.

Preface 1. Background and Introduction 1.1. Levels of Abstraction 1.2. From Program to Execution 1.3. A Brief History of Computer Development 1.4. The Intel iAPX Architecture 2. Computer Basics 2.1. The Pieces and Parts 2.2. Memory Operation 2.3. The Instruction Fetch and Execute Cycle 2.4. Performance 3. SASM--Simple Abstract Language 3.1. Assembly and Compilation 3.2. Variable Declaration 3.3. Arithmetic Operations 3.4. Control Structures 3.5. Communication with the User 3.6. A SASM Program 4. Number Systems 4.1. Numbers and Their Representation 4.2. Weighted Positional Notation 4.3. Transformations Between Radices 4.4. Representation of Noninteger Numbers 5. Data Representation 5.1. Numbers versus Their Representation 5.2. Representation of Integers 5.3. Characters 5.4. Floating Point Representation 5.5. A Little Extra On Complement Representation 6. Arithmetic and Logical Operations 6.1. Logical Operations 6.2. Shift Operations 6.3. Addition and Subtraction 6.4. Multiplication 6.5. Division 7. Floating Point Arithmetic 7.1. Hardware versus Software Calculations 7.2. Addition and Subtraction 7.3. Multiplication 7.4. Division 7.5. Advanced Topics 8. Data Structures 8.1. Memory as an Array 8.2. Arrays 8.3. Stacks 8.4. Queues 9. Using Registers for Efficiency 9.1. Instructions and Efficiency 9.2. Registers 9.3. Load/Store Architectures 9.4. Addressing Modes 10. The Pentium Architecture 10.1. Generalities 10.2. Registers 10.3. Memory Model 10.4. Addressing Modes 10.5. Instruction Set 10.6. Code Examples 11. Procedures 11.1. Procedure Call and Return Mechanisms 11.2. Dynamic Storage Allocation 11.3. Activation Records 11.4. Parameter Passing 11.5. Saving Registers 11.6. A Pentium Program That Uses Procedures 12. The Assembly Process 12.1. Where Assemblers Fit in, and What Assemblers Do 12.2. Machine Code Format and Code Generation 12.3. Linking and Loading 13. Input and Output 13.1. Typical I/O Devices 13.2. The Processor--I/O Interface 13.3. Direct Memory Access (DMA) 14. Interrupts and Exception Handling 14.1. The Mechanism 14.2. The Role of the Operating System 14.3. The Pentium Exception Mechanism 14.4. Advanced Issues in Exception Handling 15. Features for Architectural Performance 15.1. Mimimal Instruction Sets and Choices 15.2. Instruction Level Parallelism 15.3. Memory Hierarchies 16. Architecture in Perspective 16.1. What's All This about RISC? 16.2. The Single-Chip Constraint 16.3. The Motorola 68000 Family 16.4. The Cray-1 16.5. MIPS RISC 16.6. SPARC 16.7. Alpha 17. Memory Management and Virtual Memory by Barton P. Miller 17.1. Basic Concept and Terms 17.2. Base and Bounds 17.3. Segmentation 17.4. Segmentation on the Pentium 17.5. Paging 17.6. Paging and Segmentation 17.7. Multilevel Paging 17.8. Page and Segment Attributes Appendix A--Reserved Words Appendix B--SASM Appendix C--Machine Language Specification Index

Karen MillerSenior Lecturer, Computer Science Department, University of Wisconsin

"A great balance of the theoretical and practical material required for undergraduate students majoring in computer science."--Denis V. Popel, Baker University