This book presents a formal model for evaluating the cost effectiveness of computer architectures. The model can cope with a wide range of architectures, from CPU design to parallel supercomputers. To illustrate the formal procedure of trade-off analyses, several non-pipelined design alternatives for the well-known RISC architecture called DLX are analyzed quantitatively. It is formally proved that the interrupt mechanism proposed for the DLX architecture handles nested interrupts correctly.
In an appendix all programs to compute the cost and cycle time of the designs described are listed in C code. Running these simple C programs on a PC is sufficient to verify the results presented. The book addresses design professionals and students in computer architecture.

This monograph is based on the third author's lectures on computer architecture, given in the summer semester 2013 at Saarland University, Germany. It contains a gate level construction of a multi-core machine with pipelined MIPS processor cores and a sequentially consistent shared memory. The book contains the first correctness proofs for both the gate level implementation of a multi-core processor and also of a cache based sequentially consistent shared memory. This opens the way to the formal verification of synthesizable hardware for multi-core processors in the future. Constructions are in a gate level hardware model and thus deterministic. In contrast the reference models against which correctness is shown are nondeterministic. The development of the additional machinery for these proofs and the correctness proof of the shared memory at the gate level are the main technical contributions of this work.