Review of ‘The Unabridged Pentium 4’

TBR writes “Books don’t often come as big as this, and that’s big in every sense of the word. Weighing in at a massive 1649 pages (not including the 80+ pages of the detailed table of contents), there are also another 16 chapters on the accompanying CD. If you want to know something, anything, about the Intel IA32 processor family it’s here or it’s probably not worth knowing.

Organised into 12 sections, the book explores the genealogy of the Pentium family of processors, from the 386 to the 486, Pentium, Pentium Pro, Pentium II and right on through to the Pentium 4 and Pentium M group of CPUs. The book does begin with some more general material, including a look at single and multi-tasking operating systems and the problems that multi-tasking imposes.

As should be clear by now this is very much a reference manual for electronic engineers, designers of embedded system, compiler writers and so on. The coverage of material is extensive, both in breadth and depth. The technical content is such that this really isn’t a book to sit down and read from cover to cover, no matter how fascinating you find the inner workings of complex micro-processors.

Read the rest of the review at TechBookReport“