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.

Topics:

  • Introduction and history; overview of organization and design
  • Semiconductor fabrication; Moore’s Law; current trends
  • Architecture basics: von Neumann, Harvard; logic gates
  • Bits, bytes, words; signed and unsigned integers, two’s complement; floating point, IEEE 754
  • Binary arithmetic with integers and floating point operands
  • 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 archtecture

Bits, bytes, and words

Logic gates

Processor: control and datapath

Instruction sets and assembly

Memory hierarchy

Non-volatile storage

I/O, peripherals, and networking

Operating systems