The Unabridged Pentium 4 offers unparalleled coverage of Intel's IA32 family of processors, from the 386 through the Pentium 4 and Pentium M processors. Unlike other texts, which address solely a hardware or software audience, this book serves as a comprehensive technical reference for both audiences. Inside, the Mindshare trainers cover not only the hardware design and software enhancements of Intel's latest processors, they also explain the relationship between these hardware and software characteristics.

As a result, readers will come away with a complete understanding of the processor's internal architecture, the Front Side Bus (FSB), the processor's relationship to the system, and the processor's software architecture.

Essential topics covered include:

Goals of single-task and multi-task operating systems

The 386 processor—the baseline ancestor of the IA32 processor family

The 486 processor, including a cache primer

The Pentium processor

The P6 roadmap, P6 processor core, and P6 FSB

The Pentium Pro processor, including the Microcode Update feature

Pentium II and the Pentium II Xeon processors

Pentium III and Pentium III Xeon processors

The Pentium 4 processor family

The Pentium M processor

Processor identification, System Management Mode, and the IO and Local APICs

An "at-a-glance" table of contents allows readers to quickly find topics ranging from 386 Demand Mode Paging to Pentium 4 CPU Arbitration. An accompanying CD-ROM contains additional book material.

Whether you design software or hardware or are responsible for system maintenance or customer support, The Unabridged Pentium 4 will prove an invaluable reference to the world's most widely used microprocessor chips.