Computer Architecture

The Course

A core course for the 2nd year of the Department of Informatics. During the course, the foundations for understanding Computer Architecture are laid, and a wide range of topics in digital technology, design, performance measurement, and advanced computing architectures are covered.

Laboratory

The Architecture course is accompanied by a corresponding laboratory, which aims at the design and simulation of a basic Central Processing Unit (CPU).

Upon successful completion of the "Computer Architecture" course, undergraduate students will be able to:

• Understand the organization of a typical computer and the relationship between architecture and technology.

• Autonomously follow further developments in the field of computer architecture.

• Connect the needs of an application with the required hardware architecture.

• Select and recommend appropriate hardware and software components for building efficient computing systems.

1st week:
Introduction to Computer Architecture - Fundamental operating principles of computers.

2nd week:
Instruction Set Architectures (ISA)

3rd week:
Instruction Set Architectures (II) - Data origin and memory access.

4th week:
Instruction Set Architectures (III) - RISC-V Architecture

5th week:
Central Processing Unit - Design and operation of a simple CPU.

6th week:
CPU Performance - Measurement and performance improvement techniques.

7th week:
Instruction-Level Parallelism - Pipelining and other performance enhancement techniques.

8th week:
Instruction-Level Parallelism - Superscalar processors.

9th week:
Main Memory Technologies.

10th week:
Cache Memories - Organization, operation, and performance.

11th week:
Virtual Memory - Its role in the memory hierarchy.

12th week:
Input-Output Interconnection - I/O devices and buses.

13th week:
Input-Output Interconnection - Interrupts and data transfer via DMA.