The Complexity of Simple Computer Architectures

This book presents a formal model for evaluating the cost effectiveness of computer architectures. The model can cope with a wide range of architectures, from CPU design to parallel supercomputers. To illustrate the formal procedure of trade-off analyses, several non-pipelined design alternatives for the well-known RISC architecture called DLX are analyzed quantitatively. It is formally proved that the interrupt mechanism proposed for the DLX architecture handles nested interrupts correctly...