Book excerpt: “In this monumental new book, Tom Shanley pulls together 15 years of history of Intel’s mainline microprocessors, the most popular and important computer architecture in history. Shanley has a keen eye for the salient facts, and an outstanding sense for how to organize and display the material for easy accessibility by the reader. If you want to know what does this bit control, what does that feature do, and how did those instructions evolve through several generations of x86, this is the reference book for you. This is the book Intel should have written, but now they don’t have to.” —Bob Colwell, Intel Fellow The Unabridged Pentium 4 offers unparalleled coverage of Intel’s IA32 family of processors, from the 386 through the Pentium 4 and Pentium M processors. Unlike other texts, which address solely a hardware or software audience, this book serves as a comprehensive technical reference for both audiences. Inside, Tom Shanley covers not only the hardware design and software enhancements of Intel’s latest processors, he also explains the relationship between these hardware and software characteristics. As a result, readers will come away with a complete understanding of the processor’s internal architecture, the Front Side Bus (FSB), the processor’s relationship to the system, and the processor’s software architecture. Essential topics covered include: Goals of single-task and multi-task operating systems The 386 processor—the baseline ancestor of the IA32 processor family The 486 processor, including a cache primer The Pentium processor The P6 roadmap, P6 processor core, and P6 FSB The Pentium Pro processor, including the Microcode Update feature The Pentium II and the Pentium II Xeon and Celeron processors The Pentium III and the Pentium III Xeon and Celeron processors The Pentium 4 processor family The Pentium M processor Processor identification, System Management Mode, and the IO and Local APICs An “at-a-glance” table of contents allows readers to quickly find topics ranging from 386 Demand Mode Paging to Pentium 4 CPU Arbitration. The accompanying CD-ROM contains 16 extra chapters. Whether you design software or hardware or are responsible for system maintenance or customer support, The Unabridged Pentium 4 will prove an invaluable reference to the world’s most widely used microprocessor chips. MindShare’s PC System Architecture series is a crisply written and comprehensive set of guides to the most important PC hardware standards. Books in the series are intended for use by hardware and software designers, programmers, and support personnel. One of the leading technical training companies in the hardware industry, MindShare, Inc., provides innovative courses for dozens of companies, including HP, AMD, IBM, and Compaq. Through these classes and by writing the highly regarded PC System Architecture Series for Addison-Wesley, MindShare trainers emphasize the relationships of hardware subsystems to each other as well as the relationship between software and hardware.