CS 3740 - Computer Organization

3 unit(s)

Instruction set architecture design, digital logic techniques, cache memory, virtual memory, I/O architectures and devices, computer performance enhancements. Selected topics on embedded systems, parallel computer architecture and processing approaches.

Prerequisites: CS 2700

Course Learning Outcomes List

Students will be able to:

1. Explain multiple instruction set architectures and some of the trade-offs between them (PLO #3.1);

2. Describe (and quantify) components of the memory hierarchy, including cache memory, and translation lookaside buffers, and the basics of virtual memory (PLO #3.1);

3. Compute the cache miss ratio and the effective memory access time for a simple program, and the physical address for a given virtual address (PLO #3.1);

4. Describe (and quantify) interrupts, and the role of interrupts in I/O operations and other activities within a computer (PLO #3.1);

5. Describe (and quantify) hardware approaches to performance optimization, such as prefetching and pipelining instructions (PLO #3.1);

6. Describe (and quantify) bus architectures, different I/O methodologies, and data access from permanent storage devices, and identify various types of buses in a computer system;

7. Use Amdahl’s Law to calculate the speedup of a proposed change to computer architecture or design; and,

8. Describe fundamentals of an advanced topic in computer organization, such as embedded computing, parallel computing, machine virtualization, or benchmarking computer performance.

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