CS 2210

Computer Organization

Textbook: Patterson and Hennessy (2017). Computer Organization and Design: The Hardware / Software Interface, ARM® Edition. Morgan Kaufmann (Elsevier). ISBN: 979-0-12-801733-3. Available in the UVM Bookstore.

NOTE: If I teach this course again, I’ll use a different textbook.

Topics:

• Introduction and history; overview of organization and design
• Semiconductor fabrication; Moore’s Law; current trends
• Architecture basics: von Neumann, Harvard
• logic gates
• Representation: signed and unsigned integers, two’s complement; floating point, IEEE 754
• Binary arithmetic with signed and unsigned integers
• Bitwise operations
• Memory hierarchy and addressing
• CPU, clock, and datapath
• Pipelining and parallelism
• Instruction sets, assembly language, MIPS, ARM
• Non-volatile storage
• Input / output; peripherals and networking
• Operating systems

Selected course content

Portions of what appears here are adapted from Patterson and Hennessy (2017).

General introduction

• Introduction and overview
• Units
• Inside your computer
• Introduction to binary
• Mystery
• Mystery, demystified
• Boolean logic

Semiconductors and microprocessors

• Transistors
• More about transistors
• Moore’s law
• Semiconductor fabrication

Basics of architecture and organization

• Architecture vs organization I
• Architecture vs organization II
• Stored program paradigm
• Fetch, decode, execute (repeat!)
• Yikes! Assembly!
• RISC vs CISC
• Basic performance metrics

Bits, bytes, and words

• Introduction to binary
• Two’s complement
• Bitwise operations
• Binary: the big picture

Logic gates and small circuits

• Logical operations
• Transistor logic (CMOS)
• Logic gates I
• Logic gates II
• Multiplexers
• Encoders and decoders
• Ripple-carry adder
• Latches and flip-flops

Processor: control and datapath

• Clocks and synchronization
• Registers
• Datapath I
• Datapath II

Memory

• Memory and datapath
• Memory interface
• Memory hierarchy and caching

Non-volatile storage

• More to follow

I/O, peripherals, and networking

• More to follow

Operating systems

• More to follow