The era of seemingly unlimited growth in processor performance is over‎:‎ single chip architectures can no longer overcome the performance limitations imposed by the power they consume and the heat they generate‎.‎ Today‎,‎ Intel and other semiconductor firms are abandoning the single fast processor model in favor of multi‎-core microprocessors ‎- chips that combine two or more processors in a single package‎.‎ In the fourth edition of "Computer Architecture"‎,‎ the authors focus on this historic shift‎,‎ increasing their coverage of multiprocessors and exploring the most effective ways of achieving parallelism as the key to unlocking the power of multiple processor architectures‎.‎ Additionally‎,‎ the new edition has expanded and updated coverage of design topics beyond processor performance‎,‎ including power‎,‎ reliability‎,‎ availability‎,‎ and dependability‎.‎The CD material includes PDF documents that you can read with a PDF viewer such as Adobe‎,‎ Acrobat or Adobe Reader‎.‎ Recent versions of Adobe Reader for some platforms are included on the CD‎.‎ The navigation framework on this CD is delivered in HTML and JavaScript‎.‎ It is recommended that you install the latest version of your favorite HTML browser to view this CD‎.‎ The content has been verified under Windows XP with the following browsers‎:‎ Internet Explorer 6.0‎,‎ Firefox 1.5‎;‎ under Mac OS X ‎(‎Panther‎)‎ with the following browsers‎:‎ Internet Explorer 5.2‎,‎ Firefox 1.0‎.‎6‎,‎ Safari 1.3‎;‎ and under Mandriva Linux 2006 with the following browsers‎:‎ Firefox 1.0‎.‎6‎,‎ Konqueror 3.4‎.‎2‎,‎ Mozilla 1.7‎.‎11‎.‎ The content is designed to be viewed in a browser window that is at least 720 pixels wide‎.‎You may find the content does not display well if your display is not set to at least 1024x768 pixel resolution‎.‎ This CD can be used under any operating system that includes an HTML browser and a PDF viewer‎.‎ This includes Windows‎,‎ Mac OS‎,‎ and most Linux and Unix systems‎.‎ It includes increased coverage on achieving parallelism with multiprocessors‎.‎ It features case studies of latest technology from industry including the Sun Niagara Multiprocessor‎,‎ AMD Opteron‎,‎ and Pentium 4‎.‎ Three review appendices‎,‎ included in the printed volume‎,‎ review the basic and intermediate principles the main text relies upon‎.‎ Eight reference appendices‎,‎ collected on the CD‎,‎ cover a range of topics including specific architectures‎,‎ embedded systems‎,‎ application specific processors ‎- some guest authored by subject experts‎.‎