Computer architecture

Computer architecture is a broad field of computer engineering that is focused with the design of a computer’s structure. It broadly refers to the whole computer, including the instruction set architecture, organisation, and hardware design.

Harvard architectures refer to machines with a single main memory but separate caches for instructions and data.

Key concepts

• Instruction set architecture
  • CISC (x86)
  • RISC
    • ARM
    • RISC-V
    • Nios II
  • Assembly
  • Machine code
• Computer organisation
  • Processor
    • Datapath
    • Control path
  • Endianness
  • Interrupt
  • Memory
    • Memory ordering
  • Parallel port (IO devices)
• Parallel hardware
  • Data-level parallelisation
    • Pipeline
      • Data hazard
      • Control hazard
      • Branch prediction
      • Speculative execution
    • Single instruction, multiple data

Resources

• Computer Architecture: A Quantitative Approach, by John L. Hennessy and David A. Patterson