Computer Architecture

The architecture is the programmer's view of a computer. It is defined by the instruction set (language) and operand locations (registers and memory). Many different architectures exist, such as ARM, x86, MIPS, SPARC, and PowerPC. The first step in understanding any computer architecture is to learn its language.

UNIT I OVERVIEW & INSTRUCTIONS

Eight ideas – Components of a computer system – Technology – Performance – Power wall –
Uniprocessors to multiprocessors; Instructions – operations and operands – representing
instructions – Logical operations – control operations – Addressing and addressing modes.

UNIT II ARITHMETIC OPERATIONS

ALU - Addition and subtraction – Multiplication – Division – Floating Point operations –
Subword parallelism.

UNIT III PROCESSOR AND CONTROL UNIT

Basic MIPS implementation – Building datapath – Control Implementation scheme – Pipelining
– Pipelined datapath and control – Handling Data hazards & Control hazards – Exceptions.

UNIT IV PARALLELISM

Instruction-level-parallelism – Parallel processing challenges – Flynn's classification – Hardware
multithreading – Multicore processors

UNIT V MEMORY AND I/O SYSTEMS

Memory hierarchy - Memory technologies – Cache basics – Measuring and improving cache
performance - Virtual memory, TLBs - Input/output system, programmed I/O, DMA and
interrupts, I/O processors.