Computer Organisation and Architecture

Upon completion of this course, the students will be able to: 1. describe the fundamental organisation of a computer system; 2. explain the functional units of a processor; 3. explain addressing modes, instruction formats and programme control statements; 4. identify the organisation of various parts of a system memory hierarchy; 5. describe basic concept of parallel computing; and 6. describe fundamentals concepts of pipeline and vector processing.

Computer fundamentals: development history of computer hardware and software; hard- wired vs stored program concept; Von-Neuman architecture; Harvard architecture: principle of operation, advantages and disadvantages; single address machine; contemporary computers; computer system: block diagram, functions, examples, dataflow and control line; computer arithmetic: integer arithmetic (addition, subtraction, multiplication, division), floating-point representation (IEEE), floating-point arithmetic, arithmetic and logic unit (ALU). Introduction to CISC and RISC architecture: principle of operation, merits and demerits; storage and input/output systems: computer function (fetch and execute cycles), interrupts, interconnection structures (bus structure and bus types); overview of memory system, memory chip organisation and error correction, cache memory, and memory storage devices; overview of I/O, programmed and interrupt-driven I/Os, DMA, I/O channel and I/O processor; control unit: micro-operations, control of the CPU, hard-wired implementation, control unit operation, micro-instruction sequencing and execution, and micro-programmed control; using INTEL family, and MOTOROLA family as case study of a CISC computer system; instruction set and register: machine instruction characteristics, types of operands and operations, instruction functions, addressing modes, instruction formats, register organisation, and instruction pipelining; high performance computer systems: techniques to achieve high performance, pipelining, storage hierarchy, and units with function dedicated for I/O; RISC, introduction to superscalar processor, and parallel processor; using popular RISC processor (e.g. i960, Motorola PowerPC) as case study. Operating system: overview of operating system, dimension and type of operating system: overview of operating system, dimension and type of operating system, high level scheduling, short-term scheduling, I/O scheduling, memory management, virtual memory, UNIX/LINUX operating system: architecture, commands, programming; window-based operating systems (MS windows).