Michel Dubois (1953–2022) was Professor Emeritus of Electrical and Computer Engineering at the University of Southern California (USC). Before joining USC in 1984, he was a research engineer at the Central Research Laboratory of Thomson-CSF in Orsay, France. He published more than 150 technical papers on computer architecture, as well as three book chapters and three books. Murali Annavaram is the Lloyd Hunt Chair Professor in the Ming-Hsieh Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering and in the Thomas Lord department of Computer Science (joint appointment) at the University of Southern California. He is the founding director of the REAL@USC-Meta center that is focused on research and education in AI and learning. He is a Fellow of IEEE and Distinguished Member of ACM. Per Stenström is Professor at Chalmers University of Technology. His research interests are in parallel computer architecture. He has authored or co-authored four textbooks, about 200 publications and twenty patents in this area. He is a Fellow of the ACM and the IEEE and a member of Academia Europaea and the Royal Swedish Academy of Engineering Sciences. He was the 2021 recipient of ACM SIGARCH Alan Berenbaum Distinguished Service Award.

'Multi-core chips have made parallel architectures ubiquitous and their understanding a necessity. This text provides a comprehensive treatment of parallel system architecture and the fundamentals of cache coherence and memory consistency in the most compact form to date. This is a perfect text for a one-semester graduate course.' Lawrence Rauchwerger, University of Illinois at Urbana–Champaign

• Preface; 1. Introduction; 2. Processor microarchitecture; 3. Memory hierarchies; 4. Multiprocessor systems; 5. Coherence, synchronization, and memory consistency; 6. Chip multiprocessors; 7. Quantitative evaluations; 8. Graphics Processing Units; Appendix A. Impact of technology; Appendix B. Interconnection networks; Index.

Michel Dubois (1953–2022) was Professor Emeritus of Electrical and Computer Engineering at the University of Southern California (USC). Before joining USC in 1984, he was a research engineer at the Central Research Laboratory of Thomson-CSF in Orsay, France. He published more than 150 technical papers on computer architecture, as well as three book chapters and three books. Murali Annavaram is the Lloyd Hunt Chair Professor in the Ming-Hsieh Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering and in the Thomas Lord department of Computer Science (joint appointment) at the University of Southern California. He is the founding director of the REAL@USC-Meta center that is focused on research and education in AI and learning. He is a Fellow of IEEE and Distinguished Member of ACM. Per Stenström is Professor at Chalmers University of Technology. His research interests are in parallel computer architecture. He has authored or co-authored four textbooks, about 200 publications and twenty patents in this area. He is a Fellow of the ACM and the IEEE and a member of Academia Europaea and the Royal Swedish Academy of Engineering Sciences. He was the 2021 recipient of ACM SIGARCH Alan Berenbaum Distinguished Service Award.

'Multi-core chips have made parallel architectures ubiquitous and their understanding a necessity. This text provides a comprehensive treatment of parallel system architecture and the fundamentals of cache coherence and memory consistency in the most compact form to date. This is a perfect text for a one-semester graduate course.' Lawrence Rauchwerger, University of Illinois at Urbana–Champaign

• Preface; 1. Introduction; 2. Processor microarchitecture; 3. Memory hierarchies; 4. Multiprocessor systems; 5. Coherence, synchronization, and memory consistency; 6. Chip multiprocessors; 7. Quantitative evaluations; 8. Graphics Processing Units; Appendix A. Impact of technology; Appendix B. Interconnection networks; Index.