Overview

Learning Outcomes

• Appreciate the ramifications of computer architecture concepts on real-world processors and systems.
• Accelerate programs by identifying hardware and software bottlenecks.
• Understand the fundamental concepts of floating-point representation.
• Understand how errors can occur in computations because of overflow, underflow, and truncation.
• Understand the concepts of error detecting and correcting codes.
• Understand the relationship between a truth table, Boolean expression, and combinational circuit.
• Be able to derive a Boolean expression from a truth table and then simplify that expression by applying Boolean identities.
• Describe and explain how program components are linked (bound together) at runtime.
• Understand the difference between static and dynamic linking.
• Understand the interface between the software and the processor.
• Understand the tradeoffs involved in instruction set architecture design.
• Gain familiarity with memory addressing modes used in modern computer systems.
• Understand the concept of instruction-level pipelining and its effect on performance.
• Master the concept of hierarchical memory organization.
• Understand how each level of the memory hierarchy contributes to system performance, and how the performance is measured.
• Master the concepts behind cache memory, virtual memory, memory segmentation, paging, and address translation.
• Understand how I/O systems work, including I/O methods and architectures.
• Become familiar with storage media and the differences in their respective formats.
• Understand how to improve disk performance and reliability.
• Be familiar with the capabilities and limitations of emerging data storage technologies.