To expose the learner to a strong foundation of the internal structure of the computer system and the interconnecting hardware components

CLO 1: Explain the internal workings of all the hardware building blocks of the computer system.

CLO 2: Distinguish the various architectures of computer systems

CLO 3: Apply the principles of computer architecture to future computer designs.

CLO 4: Choose various design alternatives given a real-word problem.

Building blocks of the computer system: CPU, memory, I/O, instruction set architecture; the processor; registers, ALU, internal bus, Finite State Machine, Architectures of computer systems: Pipelined processor microarchitecture; Pipelined cache microarchitecture; Data, control, and name hazards; CISC and RISC systems; advanced Processors; Superscalar execution, out-of-order execution, Very long instruction word (VLIW) processors, Single instruction, multiple data (SIMD) processors. Memory synchronisation, consistency, and coherence. Virtualisation. Emerging trends: distributed systems; cloud computing; quantum computing; Computer systems performance evaluation: Performance metrics; optimisation techniques; simulation and modelling of computer systems.