On Mon, Oct 6, 2014 at 8:28 AM, Aaron Durbin adurbin@chromium.org wrote:
On Mon, Oct 6, 2014 at 9:42 AM, prasnik@anche.no wrote:
Dear cb folks,
I ask you some advice on material that is worth reading in order to gain fundamental notions on computer architecture.
Which book do you suggest to that purpose?
These aren't specific to x86 or any particular architecture -- just computer arch in general. I find them to helpful/interesting:
http://www.amazon.com/Inside-Machine-Introduction-Microprocessors-Architectu...
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0201633388/ref=wms_ohs_product?ie=UTF8&...
There are more academic books, but I think the above provide an interesting introduction. If you are looking for more practical books about a particular architecture those exist as well. However, there's nothing (that I know of) that encompasses the expanse that is historical x86 systems.
Aaron's suggestions are spot on. If you want exactly "computer architecture" then study those books.
If you want to take a slightly off-track approach, study http://wiki.osdev.org/Main_Page with the idea of writing an Operating System from scratch. I realize you probably aren't going to write an Operating System, but that knowledge is critical to understanding what Coreboot is doing.
Good luck! David