When my editor dropped a stack of seven books on PC architecture onto my desk I was quite intimidated. Browsing through the titles to see that they covered the detailed architecture of things like ISA, the Pentium, PCMCIA and so on didn't help. These books are used by hardware and software engineers at IBM, Intel, Compaq and Dell—that's right, these books are used by the guys who design the top PC brands. How many of our readers design PC's for a living? Probably not many. But once I started reading through the books I was hooked.
January 8, 1997
Heavy duty engineer types may use these books, but they are quite readable and fascinating for those of us who are only moderately technical. The PC System Architecture Series by Tom Shanley and Don Anderson details exactly how PC's handle data—how they decide where to store it in memory and shuffle it between I/O devices. Parts of these books will be very enlightening for programmers, especially those who use or would like to use assembly, since they help to understand exactly what happens to carry out the instructions a programmer writes. PC technicians and hardware troubleshooters will find that the books enhance their understanding of how the pieces of a PC work together, which can be very helpful in their work. Users looking to learn how to open up their PC and diagnose and replace components such as expansion cards and hard drives will want to look elsewhere, though.
The first volume in the series is ISA System Architecture, and it covers the Plain Jane PC. It examines the 286 and 386 processors, and the ISA bus which is the baseline of PC architecture. Once you've read this volume you'll have the basics of PC design down, and can move on to more specialized information. The other volumes are all split into processors and bus architecture.
The processor books cover the 486, Pentium, and PowerPC. Each book details the functional units of the processor, such as the Floating Point Unit (FPU), Control Unit, cache, etc., then moves on to how the processor communicates with the hardware of the rest of the PC. The 486 book has an especially detailed look at the on chip cache, while the Pentium volume adds discussion of multiple processor systems. The PowerPC book is the thickest of the lot, providing extensive coverage of the PowerPC architecture, with plenty of attention to instructions available to operating system designers. The second half of the book focuses specifically on the PowerPC 601.
The bus architecture books cover the EISA, PCI, and PCMCIA buses. Each book describes the operation of its bus, including interrupt handling, bus cycles, data transfer modes, DMA, conflict resolution, and system configuration, since each of the buses offers certain plug and play abilities.
Although the level of detail in these books is very high, the authors make it very accessible and understandable to someone with an intermediate level of understanding. If you know the differences between ISA, EISA and PCI from a general point of view, for instance, these books will probably be at the right level for you to learn their differences from a more detailed point of view. The series is not for PC novices, but they're just right for knowledgeable people who want to take the next step and become gurus.
