Students acquire an understanding and appreciation of a computer system’s functional components, their characteristics, performance, and interactions. Students evaluate computer architecture to develop programs that can achieve high performance through a programmer’s awareness of parallelism and latency. In selecting a system to use, students analyze the tradeoff among various components, such as CPU clock speed, cycles per instruction, memory size, and average memory access time. Topics include digital logic, assembly language machine organization, and hardware-level C and assembly language programming.
Prerequisite Courses
Semester Offered
Varies