Computer Organization and Architecture

Catalog description

The goal of the course is to teach the design and operation of a digital computer. It serves the student in two ways: First, for those who want to continue studying computer architecture, embedded systems, and other low-level aspects of computer systems, it lays the foundation of detailed implementation experience needed to make the quantitative tradeoffs in more advanced courses meaningful; and, second, for a student interested in other areas of computer science, it solidifies an intuition about why hardware is as it is and how software interacts with hardware. Topics include technology trends and their implications, performance measurement, instruction sets, computer arithmetic, design and control of a datapath, pipelining, memory hierarchies, input and output, and brief introduction to multiprocessors.