References: CPE380 Introduction (Chapter 1)
The introductory slides I
used in the lectures are the primary reference.
To familiarize everyone with the "guts" of a computer, I like to
begin with a guided tour through the parts of a PC. There are
lots of similar walk-throughs available on the WWW and
elsewhere. I've also collected a few overview
diagrams showing what's inside a modern PC and processor.
The book gives a reasonable introduction and defines a lot of
terminology; you should be aware of those terms. The following
links provide additional history references.
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Many technical and research papers, and historically significant documents,
are available online from a wide range of organizations, including IEEE and
ACM. For example, what became known as "Moore's Law" was really the
predictions in Gordon E. Moore's article, Cramming more
components onto integrated circuits. You might not be able to get that
paper for free without using a subscription... and UK has many subscriptions
you can directly access by EZProxy. You use
this by editing the URL, as I have here: https://ieeexplore-ieee-org.ezproxy.uky.edu/abstract/document/4785860.
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One of many interesting history sites is The Computer Museum
History Center.
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Blinkenlights has a cute little summary of the history of
personal computing.
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Intel Museum: Decades of Innovation discusses only their chips,
but is a nice little slice of the history of microprocessors.
Note that Intel frequently re-arranges their site, so the link
above breaks/changes fairly often.
Here is another nice reference (although getting details
takes a lot of clicks from there).
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Another goodie from Intel is:
From Sand to Silicon: the Making of a Chip.
Hopefully, it will not move soon.... ;-)
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Tom's Hardware maintains a very impressive collection of info
about processors; it began as
"The Mother of All CPU Charts," summarizing 111 processors and their
performance on 3330 benchmarks (30 for each processor). The
ultimate table of processor specs also was there, listing clock
rates, transistor complexities, die sizes, power, etc.
Here is one version.
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On a more personal note, when supercomputer manufacturers
started dropping like flies back in 1996, I wrote Is Parallel processing Dead?,
which gives my biased view of how a bunch of parallel computer
companies imploded as parallel processing became mainstream.
There's a lot less diversity in parallel supercomputing systems
now, but the field is generally quite healthy.
Computer Organization and Design.