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Reviewer: Maurice S. Elzas

This book is based on the senior undergraduate and graduate courses in computer architecture that Zargham has taught at Southern Illinois University; it is intended for senior and graduate students in computer science and electrical engineering. Its goal is to provide a foundation for understanding and evaluating the design principles incorporated in modern computers. An additional objective is to teach basic techniques for designing parallel systems and their algorithms. The book is divided into nine chapters and three appendices. Chapter 1 is an introduction; it presents a classification of computer designs. Chapter 2 details the main aspects of the classic von Neumann architecture. Chapter 3 expands this material with a treatment of pipelined architectures. Chapter 4 is devoted to a comparison of the reasoning behind—and the relative advantages of—reduced instruction set and complex instruction set processors, with relevant examples. Chapter 5 discusses interconnection networks and their topology. The goal of this chapter is to present the decisions that have to be made when designing parallel computers. This is logically followed by a chapter on multiprocessors and multicomputers, which places the material presented in chapter 5 in a specific context. After this description of the hardware possibilities, chapter 7 discusses the programming challenges, down to the level of the interaction between data and algorithms. Chapter 8 explains dataflow and systolic designs. Finally, chapter 9 is devoted to the newest avenues in computer architecture, namely neural networks, multiple-valued logic, and fuzzy logic, all of which attempt to emulate the human brain. Three appendices discuss the basics of very large scale integrated circuit design, combinatorial and sequential circuits, and the Very High Speed Integrated Circuit Hardware Description La nguage. A useful index ends the book. The large variations in the depth of treatment of different subjects make it difficult to identify the appropriate audience for this book and how it can best be used. In many places, it will be difficult for students who only want to study the principles of modern computer architecture, and in other places it might not give sufficient detail for those who want to design computers. It must be said, however, that large parts of this trade cannot be taught in a book and must be learned by doing (or rather by failing). If certain parts are skipped, this text is a good source of basic knowledge about computer architecture. Sadly, the first chapter is one of the many examples of how short our memories are when it comes to the history of our field. To compensate for the author's rather harsh statement about ENIAC (which was the first digital parallel computer), recall that its parallelism was one of the reasons that programs had to be patched on that machine. Notwithstanding a few minor flaws, this is a sound, thorough, and up-to-date text on computer architecture. It can be used in several ways, depending on the goals of the students and the instructor.