The purpose of this book is to serve as a graduate-level reference on state-of-the-art microprocessors. After a brief discussion of the general structure of microprocessors and computer architecture, the main portion of this book describes three CISC and five RISC microprocessors. The book concludes with an overview of how advanced microprocessors are constructed and a description of several tradeoffs among these processors.

The chapters describing Intel’s 80486, Motorola’s 68040, and National’s 32532 go into detail on architecture, processor family history, and instruction set information. Associated with the details on each feature is a discussion of the manufacturer’s considerations in making architectural tradeoffs.

The RISC chapters are briefer but describe the same content, taking heed of the “R” in the acronym RISC. They cover Intel’s 80860, Motorola’s 88000, AMD’s 29000, Sun’s SPARC, and IBM’s RS/6000.

This book has a couple of shortcomings. One is the omission of the MIPS R3000 family’s architecture. It should have been covered because it will be one of two possible Joint Integrated Avionics Working Group standard processors; because it is the host processor of many popular workstations, such as the VAXstation; and because it is included in some of the discussion of tradeoffs in the final chapter. The other drawback is that the chapter on system development describes less advanced in-circuit emulation (ICE) and microprocessor development stations (MDS) procedures while leaving out some of the more modern VLSI-to-foundry processes. Despite the drawbacks, this book gives a good overview of techniques used to speed microprocessors in the process of describing their architectures and architectural design rationales.