Comparisons with chimps, bonobos and gorillas reveal a number of substantial differences between apes and humans. Humans eat far more meat than primates, and, due to a lack of an oestrous swelling, a woman’s oestrus cycle is a mystery to men. Human infants require high parental investment. Neonate survival benefits from the lengthy pair bond that humans generally form. For long-term relationships both men and women look for loving and dependable partners who are in good health. Where the sexes differ lies in men’s greater emphasis on good looks and women’s preference for status and wealth. The reproductive strategy of an individual will depend on a number of factors such as the availability of suitable partners and the perceived attractiveness and age of a person. Evolutionary psychologists suggest that a woman’s mating strategy may be influenced by the nature of her parents’ relationship during her childhood.

In 1872 Darwin published The Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animalswhere he argued that there are a number of emotional expressions which are innate and common to all cultures – universal emotions. Such expressions include sadness, anger, surprise and enjoyment. The universality of human emotions is supported by three forms of evidence. Comparison with other primates suggests a common evolutionary ancestor; cross-cultural studies suggest that different cultures recognize and experience the same basic emotions; and certain areas of the human forebrain appear to be particularly associated with emotional states. Specifically, the amygdala and the orbitofrontal cortex. Negative states such as fear and anger may have evolved in order to place people in the correct psychological and physiological state to deal with aversive circumstances. Positive emotions such as love might serve the function of placing us in the appropriate psychological state to help build up social relationships.

This chapter is devoted to design principles of multiprocessor systems, focusing on two architectural styles: shared-memory and message-passing. Both styles use multiple processors with to achieve a linear speedup of computational power with the number of processors but differ in the method of data exchange. Processors in shared-memory multiprocessors share the same address space and can exchange data through shared-memory locations by regular load and store instructions. This chapter reviews the programming model abstractions for shared-memory and message-passing multiprocessors, then the semantics of message-passing primitives, the protocols needed, and architectural support to accelerate message processing. It covers support of a shared-memory model abstraction by reviewing the concept of cache coherence, the design space of snoopy-cache coherence protocols, classification of communication events, and translation-lookaside buffer consistency strategies. Scalable models of shared memory are treated, with an emphasis on the design of cache coherence solutions that can be applied at a large scale as well as the software techniques to deal with page mappings to exploit locality.

Individual differences researchers investigate many kinds of psychological variation, but the most widely studied of these are personality and intelligence. Personality is defined in many ways, but one way of thinking of it is as a form of motivational system which predisposes people to seek out particular situations and respond in particular ways. Personality is measured most frequently by self-report questionnaires. These questionnaires usually describe a personality on a number of dimensions of factors (e.g. extraversion, neuroticism, psychoticism). Research using twin studies suggests that personality is moderately heritable. Theories developed to explain variation in personality have to account for both heritable and non-heritable components. It is necessary not only to understand why personality might be passed on through the genes, but also why so much of the variation in personality appears to be due to the environment. Various theories were advanced to explain both of these aspects of personality.

In 1871 in The Descent of Man and Selection in Relation to Sex, Darwin introduced the notion of sexual selection. Sexual selection leads to features that help individuals gain access to mates and takes two forms – intrasexual and intersexual selection. Intrasexual selection involves competition between members of one sex for access to the opposite sex, while intersexual selection involves members of one sex attempting to attract members of the opposite sex. In nature these forces are believed to lead to elevated levels of aggression, greater body strength and the development of attractive features in males. For females sexual selection leads to choosiness over mates. Sexual selection theory and the notion of female choice have recently become important concepts for the understanding of behaviour. There is now clear evidence from a number of species that female choice has been a driving force in the evolution of male adornment and aggressive behaviour.

For the past 30 years we have lived through the information revolution, powered by the explosive growth of semiconductor integration and the internet. The exponential performance improvement of semiconductor devices was predicted by Moore’s law as early as the 1960s. Moore’s law predicts that the computing power of microprocessors will double every 18-24 months at constant cost so that their cost-effectiveness (the ratio between performance and cost) will grow at an exponential rate. It has been observed that the computing power of entire systems also grows at the same pace. This law has endured the test of time and remains valid today. This law will be tested repeatedly, both now and in the future, as many people today see strong evidence that the "end of the ride" is near, mostly because the miniaturization of CMOS technology is rapidly reaching its limit. This chapter reviews technology trends underpinning the evolution of computer systems. It also introduces metrics for performance comparison of computer systems and fundamental laws that drive the field of computer systems such as Amdahl’s law.

Evolutionary psychologists used the concepts of inclusive fitness theory, evolved psychological mechanisms and kin altruism to help explain social behaviour in ourselves and animals. Inclusive fitness is an estimate of the number of genes that individuals pass on both directly via their offspring and indirectly via their effects on the survival of other kin. Kin altruism is the term used for self-sacrificing acts towards kin. The tendency to provide aid to relatives appears to be related to the proportion of genes shared by common descent (the coefficient of relatedness). Evolutionists explain many acts of social behaviour in animals in terms of nepotistic strategies. Parental investment consists of the amount of time and effort that an individual puts into rearing each of its offspring. The grandmother hypothesis is the notion that the menopause came about because, by shifting their investment from offspring to grandoffspring, a woman can increase her inclusive fitness.

This chapter is dedicated to the correct and reliable communication of values in shared-memory multiprocessors. Correctness properties of the memory system of shared-memory multiprocessors include coherence, the memory consistency model, and the reliable execution of synchronization primitives. Since CMPs are designed as shared-memory multi-core systems, this chapter targets correctness issues not only in symmetric multiprocessors (SMPs) or large-scale cache coherent distributed shared-memory systems, but also in CMPs with core multi-threading. The chapter reviews the hardware components of a shared-memory architecture and why memory correctness properties are so hard to enforce in modern shared-memory multiprocessor systems. We then treat various levels of coherence and the difference between plain memory coherence and store atomicity. We introduce memory models and sequential consistency, the most fundamental memory model, enforcing sequential consistency by store synchronization. Finally, we review thread synchronization and ISA-level synchronization primitives and relaxed memory models based on hardware efficiency and relaxed memory models relying on synchronization.

The chapter also covers compiler-centric approaches to build computers known as VLIW computers. Apart from reviewing the design principles of VLIW pipelines, we also review compiler techniques to uncover instruction-level parallelism, including loop unrolling, software pipelining, and trace scheduling. Finally, this chapter covers vector machines.

The instruction set is the interface between the hardware and the software and must be followed meticulously when designing a computer. This chapter starts with introducing the instruction set of a computer. A basic instruction set is used throughout the book. This instruction set is broadly inspired by the MIPS instruction set, a rather simple instruction set which is representative of many instruction sets such as ARM and RISC V. We then review how one can support a representative instruction set with the concept of static pipelining. We start with reviewing a simple 5-stage pipeline and all issues involved in avoiding hazards. This simple pipeline is gradually augmented to allow for higher instruction execution rates including out-of-order instruction completion, superpipelining, and superscalar designs.

Given the widening gaps between processor speed, main memory (DRAM) speed, and secondary memory (disk) speed, it has become more and more difficult in recent years to feed data and instructions at the speed required by the processor while providing the ever-expanding memory space expected by modern applications.