Survey of Advanced Microprocessors

Book excerpt: Microprocessors have come a long way since their conception. They have become formidable processing tools, and we encounter them in almost every part of our daily activities, from the kitchen with its microwave oven to the cockpit of a sophisticated aircraft. The purposes of this book are to "walk through" the current microprocessor technology and briefly to describe some of the most advanced microprocessors available. The book is a survey of ad vanced microprocessors, aimed particularly at the engineering manager rather than the design engineer. Chapter One outlines the history of microprocessors and describes some terminology used in computer architecture. Chapter Two discusses advanced computer concepts, such as data and data types, addressing modes, pipe lining, and cache memory. Chapter Three .describes new computer architectures, such as reduced-instruction-set computers (RISes) and very-long-instruc tion-word computers. RISC architecture has become very popular among designers. Chapter Four discusses an architecture, data-flow, which is a departure from the conventional von Neumann architecture. NEC has applied the dataflow architecture on the design of a very sophis ticated image processing chip, the NEC PD7281. Chapters Five and Six are case studies, describing the Am29000 and the Transputer, respectively. Chapter Seven describes microprocessors specifically designed for digital signal processing. Chapter Eight discusses micromultiprocessing and describes the various topologies currently used.