COA Notes (half)

Introduction to Computer Architecture/Review of basic computer architecture/Computers as basic elements of human life in embedded systems, laptops, tablets, and intelligent applications/Understanding the components inside a computer and how they work
Quantitative Techniques in Computer Performance/Measuring and reporting performance/Analyzing computer performance
Pipelining Design/Instruction and arithmetic pipelines/Hazards/Techniques for handling hazards/Overlapping instruction execution
Memory Technology/Memory hierarchy properties/Cache memory organization/Inclusion, coherence, and locality/Techniques for reducing cache misses/Virtual memory organization/Management techniques/Memory replacement policies
Parallelism/Introduction/Classification of parallel computers/Array and vector processors/Shared-distributed shared-memory architecture/Interconnection networks
Basic Operation of a Computer/Basic mechanisms through which an instruction is executed/ALU registers: general purpose, special purpose, and temporary registers
Von Neumann Model/Five major components: input unit, output unit, arithmetic logic unit, memory unit, and control unit/System bus for communication among components
Instruction Set Architecture (ISA)/Interface between hardware and software/Instructions as words in a computer's language/Instruction set as the vocabulary of a computer's language/Instructions indicating the operation to perform and the operands to use
Addressing Modes/How the location of an operand is specified in an instruction/Common techniques: immediate, direct, indirect, register, displacement, stack
CISC and RISC Architectures/Complex Instruction Set Computer (CISC)/Reduced Instruction Set Computer (RISC)
MIPS Architecture/Popular RISC processor/Simple, commonly used instructions/All instructions have 3 operands
Computer Arithmetic/ALU performs arithmetic operations
Memory Organization/Memory hierarchy/Primary and secondary memory/Memory as an array of storage locations with unique addresses
Bus Architecture/System bus/Communication pathway between functional units
Input/Output Units/Devices to feed data to the computer system/Devices to send the result of computation to the outside world
Performance Evaluation/Measuring computer performance
Amdahl's Law