Learning Computer Architecture with Raspberry Pi

Introduction 1Cambridge 1Cut to the Chase 3The Knee in the Curve 4Forward the Foundation 5CHAPTER 1 The Shape of a Computer Phenomenon 7Growing Delicious, Juicy Raspberries 7System-on-a-Chip 10An Exciting Credit Card-Sized Computer 12What Does the Raspberry Pi Do? 14Meeting and Greeting the Raspberry Pi Board 14GPIO Pins 15Status LEDs 16USB Receptacles 18Ethernet Connection 18Audio Out 19Composite Video 21CSI Camera Module Connector 21HDMI 22Micro USB Power 22Storage Card 23DSI Display Connection 24Mounting Holes 25The Chips 25The Future 25CHAPTER 2 Recapping Computing 27The Cook as Computer 28Ingredients as Data 28Basic Actions 30The Box That Follows a Plan 31Doing and Knowing 31Programs Are Data 32Memory 33Registers 34The System Bus 36Instruction Sets 36Voltages, Numbers and Meaning 37Binary: Counting in 1s and 0s 37The Digit Shortage 40Counting and Numbering and 0 40Hexadecimal as a Shorthand for Binary 41Doing Binary and Hexadecimal Arithmetic 43Operating Systems: The Boss of the Box 44What an Operating System Does 44Saluting the Kernel 46Multiple Cores 46CHAPTER 3 Electronic Memory 47There Was Memory Before There Were Computers 47Rotating Magnetic Memory 48Magnetic Core Memory 50How Core Memory Works 50Memory Access Time 52Static Random Access Memory (SRAM) 53Address Lines and Data Lines 54Combining Memory Chips into Memory Systems 56Dynamic Random Access Memory (DRAM) 59How DRAM Works 60Synchronous vs Asynchronous DRAM 62SDRAM Columns, Rows, Banks, Ranks and DIMMs 64DDR, DDR2 DDR3 and DDR4 SDRAM 66Error-Correcting Code (ECC) Memory 69The Raspberry Pi Memory System 70Power Reduction Features 70Ball-Grid Array Packaging 71Cache 72Locality of Reference 72Cache Hierarchy 72Cache Lines and Cache Mapping 74Direct Mapping 76Associative Mapping 78Set-Associative Cache 79Writing Cache Back to Memory 81Virtual Memory 81The Virtual Memory Big Picture 82Mapping Virtual to Physical 83Memory Management Units: Going Deeper 84Multi-Level Page Tables and the TLB 88The Raspberry Pi Swap Problem 88Watching Raspberry Pi Virtual Memory 90CHAPTER 4 ARM Processors and Systems-on-a-Chip 93The Incredible Shrinking CPU 93Microprocessors 94Transistor Budgets 95Digital Logic Primer 95Logic Gates 96Flip-Flops and Sequential Logic 97Inside the CPU 99Branching and Flags 101The System Stack 102System Clocks and Execution Time 105Pipelining 106Pipelining in Detail 108Deeper Pipelines and Pipeline Hazards 109The ARM11 Pipeline 112Superscalar Execution 113More Parallelism with SIMD 115Endianness 118Rethinking the CPU: CISC vs RISC 119RISC's Legacy 121Expanded Register Files 122Load/Store Architecture 122Orthogonal Machine Instructions 123Separate Caches for Instructions and Data 123ARMs from Little Acorns Grow 124Microarchitectures, Cores and Families 125Selling Licenses Rather Than Chips 125ARM11 126The ARM Instruction Set 126Processor Modes 129Modes and Registers 131Fast Interrupts 137Software Interrupts 137Interrupt Priority 138Conditional Instruction Execution 139Coprocessors 142The ARM Coprocessor Interface 143The System Control Coprocessor 143The Vector Floating Point (VFP) Coprocessor 144Emulating Coprocessors 145ARM Cortex 145Multiple-Issue and Out-Of-Order Execution 146Thumb 2 147Thumb EE 147big.LITTLE 147The NEON Coprocessor for SIMD 148ARMv8 and 64-Bit Computing 148Systems on a Single Chip 150The Broadcom BCM2835 SoC 150Broadcom's Second- and Third-Generation SoC Devices 151How VLSI Chips Happen 151Processes, Geometries and Masks 152IP: Cells, Macrocells and Cores 153Hard and Soft IP 154Floorplanning, Layout and Routing 154Standards for On-Chip Communication: AMBA 155CHAPTER 5 Programming 159Programming from a Height 159The Software Development Process 160Waterfall vs Spiral vs Agile 162Programming in Binary 165Assembly Language and Mnemonics 166High-Level Languages 167Après BASIC, Le Deluge 170Programming Terminology 171How Native-Code Compilers Work 173Preprocessing 174Lexical Analysis 175Semantic Analysis 175Intermediate Code Generation 176Optimisation 176Target Code Generation 176Compiling C: A Concrete Example 177Linking Object Code Files to Executable Files 183Pure Text Interpreters 184Bytecode Interpreted Languages 186P-Code 186Java 187Just-In-Time (JIT) Compilation 189Bytecode and JIT Compilation Beyond Java 191Android, Java and Dalvik 191Data Building Blocks 192Identifiers, Reserved Words, Symbols and Operators 192Values, Literals and Named Constants 193Variables, Expressions and Assignment 193Types and Type Definitions 194Static and Dynamic Typing 196Two's Complement and IEEE 754 198Code Building Blocks 200Control Statements and Compound Statements 200If/Then/Else 200Switch and Case 202Repeat Loops 205While Loops 205For Loops 207The Break and Continue Statements 208Functions 210Locality and Scope 211Object-Oriented Programming 214Encapsulation 217Inheritance 219Polymorphism 221OOP Wrapup 224A Tour of the GNU Compiler Collection Toolset 224gcc as Both Compiler and Builder 225Using Linux Make 228CHAPTER 6 Non-Volatile Storage 231Punched Cards and Tape 232Punched Cards 232Tape Data Storage 232The Dawn of Magnetic Storage 235Magnetic Recording and Encoding Schemes 236Flux Transitions 237Perpendicular Recording 238Magnetic Disk Storage 240Cylinders, Tracks and Sectors 240Low-Level Formatting 242Interfaces and Controllers 244Floppy Disk Drives 246Partitions and File Systems 247Primary Partitions and Extended Partitions 247File Systems and High-Level Formatting 249The Future: GUID Partition Tables (GPTs) 249Partitions on the Raspberry Pi SD Card 250Optical Discs 252CD-Derived Formats 254DVD-Derived Formats 254Ramdisks 255Flash Storage 257ROMs, PROMs and EPROMs 257Flash as EEPROM 258Single-Level vs Multi-Level Storage 260NOR vs NAND Flash 261Wear Levelling and the Flash Translation Layer 265Garbage Collection and TRIM 267SD Cards 268eMMC 270The Future of Non-Volatile Storage 271CHAPTER 7 Wired and Wireless Ethernet 273The OSI Reference Model for Networking 274The Application Layer 276The Presentation Layer 276The Session Layer 278The Transport Layer 278The Network Layer 279The Data Link Layer 281The Physical Layer 282Ethernet 282Thicknet and Thinnet 283The Basic Ethernet Idea 283Collision Detection and Avoidance 285Ethernet Encoding Systems 286PAM-5 Encoding 29010BASE-T and Twisted-Pair Cabling 291From Bus Topology to Star Topology 292Switched Ethernet 293Routers and the Internet 296Names vs Addresses 296IP Addresses and TCP Ports 297Local IP Addresses and DHCP 300Network Address Translation 302Wi-Fi 304Standards within Standards 305Facing the Real World 305Wi-Fi Equipment in Use 309Infrastructure Networks vs Ad Hoc Networks 311Wi-Fi Distributed Media Access 312Carrier Sense and the Hidden Node Problem 314Fragmentation 315Amplitude Modulation, Phase Modulation and QAM 316Spread-Spectrum Techniques 319Wi-Fi Modulation and Coding in Detail 320How Wi-Fi Connections Happen 323Wi-Fi Security 325Wi-Fi on the Raspberry Pi 326Even More Networking 329CHAPTER 8 Operating Systems 331Introduction to Operating Systems 333History of Operating Systems 333The Basics of Operating Systems 336The Kernel: The Basic Facilitator of Operating Systems 343Operating System Control 344Modes 345Memory Management 346Virtual Memory 347Multitasking 347Disk Access and File Systems 348Device Drivers 349Enablers and Assistants to the Operating System 349Waking Up the OS 349Firmware 353Operating Systems for Raspberry Pi 354NOOBS 354Third-Party Operating Systems 356Other Available Operating Systems 356CHAPTER 9 Video Codecs and Video Compression 359The First Video Codecs 360Exploiting the Eye 361Exploiting the Data 363Understanding Frequency Transform 367Using Lossless Encoding Techniques 371Changing with the Times 373The Latest Standards from MPEG 374H.265 378Motion Search 378Video Quality 381Processing Power 382CHAPTER 10 3D Graphics 383A Brief History of 3D Graphics 383The Graphical User Interface (GUI) 3843D Graphics in Video Games 386Personal Computing and the Graphics Card 387Two Competing Standards 390The OpenGL Graphics Pipeline 391Geometry Specification and Attributes 393Geometry Transformation 396Lighting and Materials 400Primitive Assembly and Rasterisation 403Pixel Processing (Fragment Shading) 405Texturing 407Modern Graphics Hardware 411Tiled Rendering 411Geometry Rejection 413Shading 415Caching 416Raspberry Pi GPU 417Open VG 421General Purpose GPUs 423Heterogeneous Architectures 423OpenCL 425CHAPTER 11 Audio 427Can You Hear Me Now? 427MIDI 428Sound Cards 428Analog vs Digital 429Sound and Signal Processing 430Editing 431Compression 431Recording with Effects 432Encoding and Decoding Information for Communication 4331-Bit DAC 434I2S 436Raspberry Pi Sound Input/Output 437Audio Output Jack 437HDMI 438Sound on the Raspberry Pi 438Raspberry Pi Sound on Board 439Manipulating Sound on the Raspberry Pi 439CHAPTER 12 Input/Output 447Introducing Input/Output 448I/O Enablers 451Universal Serial Bus 452USB Powered Hubs 455Ethernet 457Universal Asynchronous Receiver/Transmitters 458Small Computer Systems Interface 459Parallel ATA 459Serial Advanced Technology Attachment 460RS-232 Serial 460High Definition Media Interface 461I2S 462I2C 463Raspberry Pi Display, Camera Interface and JTAG 464Raspberry Pi GPIO 464GPIO Overview and the Broadcom SoC 465Meeting the GPIO 466Programming GPIO 473Alternative Modes 479GPIO Experimentation the Easy Way 480Index 481