10.6 For More Information

Like the previous chapter, this chapter deals with issues of computer architecture. There are many college and professional texts on computer architecture available that will provide additional information about instruction set design and the choices and trade-offs one must make when designing an instruction set. Patterson and Hennessy's Computer Architecture: A Quantitative Approach is one of the better regarded texts on this subject (though it is a bit heavily biased towards RISC architectures). The data books for your particular CPU will discuss the instruction encoding for that CPU and detail the operation of each machine instruction the CPU supports. A good text on assembly language programming may also prove helpful when learning more about instruction set design (such as my text for Intel 80x86 users, The Art of Assembly Language ). For details on the design of the 80x86 instruction set, you'll want to check out Intel's Pentium manuals, available online at http://www.intel.com. Of course, similar information isavailable at just about every CPU manufacturer's website.