CS 2210

Author

Clayton Cafiero

Published

July 7, 2025

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

General introduction

Semiconductors and microprocessors

Basics of architecture and organization

Bits, bytes, and words

Logic gates and small circuits

Processor: control and datapath

Instruction sets and assembly

  • More to follow

Memory hierarchy

  • More to follow

Non-volatile storage

  • More to follow

I/O, peripherals, and networking

  • More to follow

Operating systems

  • More to follow