Computer Organization

Catalog description

An introduction into the organization and architecture of CPU, memory, and I/O devices, and the interaction between software and hardware. Topics include assembly language programming, Von Neumann architecture, representing data and instructions in memory, integer and floating point arithmetic in hardware, pipelining, memory systems, caching, the I/O system, and performance analysis. At the end of this course students will be able to write simple and complex programs in Assembly language, convert between C and Assembly, assess performance of a program on a machine, and understand how modern processors achieve multiple instructions per cycle.