CS 208: Computer Organization and Architecture

Readings: byte order, floating point numbers, and digital logic for multiplication

This week (week 5 of the term), we'll look at a miscellany of important and interesting topics before diving into the heart of the course (Chapter 4: The Processor) during week 6.

Here's a list of readings that will help introduce you to this week's topics, in the order in which we'll examine them, roughly one topic per class day.

• There's a weird and important concept called "byte order" or "endianness" that well-educated programmers and computer scientists need to know about. In some sense, it's trivial, but it has wide-spread implications for the functioning of computer systems. The Wikipedia entry on Endianness is a fine starting place. It's also worth reading the famous paper on the topic (which adopted the terminology "endianness"): Danny Cohen's On Holy Wars and a Plea for Peace. (That link to Cohen's paper lacks the pictures that appeared on initial publication. Here's a bad scan if you want to see them.) Finally, to get the full flavor of the topic, you might want to read Jonathan Swift's Gulliver's Travels.
• Read Section 3.3 of Patterson and Hennessy, on Multiplication.
• Read Section 3.5 of Patterson and Hennessy, on Floating Point.