Module 3

ACM KA: Architecture and Organization (AR)

Computing professionals should not regard the computer as just a black box that executes programs by magic. The knowledge area Architecture and Organization builds on Systems Fundamentals (SF) to develop a deeper understanding of the hardware environment upon which all computing is based, and the interface it provides to higher software layers. Students should acquire an understanding and appreciation of a computer system’s functional components, their characteristics, performance, and interactions, and, in particular, the challenge of harnessing parallelism to sustain performance improvements now and into the future. Students need to understand computer architecture to develop programs that can achieve high performance through a programmer’s awareness of parallelism and latency. In selecting a system to use, students should be able to understand the tradeoff among various components, such as CPU clock speed, cycles per instruction, memory size, and average memory access time.

ACM KA Topics:

• Digital Logic and Digital Systems

  • Overview and history of computer architecture

  • Combinational vs. sequential logic/Field programmable gate arrays as a fundamental combinational + sequential logic building block

  • Multiple representations/layers of interpretation (hardware is just another layer)

  • Computer-aided design tools that process hardware and architectural representations

  • Register transfer notation/Hardware Description Language (Verilog/VHDL)

  • Physical constraints (gate delays, fan-in, fan-out, energy/power)

• Machine Level Representation of Data

  • Bits, bytes, and words

  • Numeric data representation and number bases

  • Fixed- and floating-point systems

  • Signed and twos-complement representations

  • Representation of non-numeric data (character codes, graphical data)

  • Representation of records and arrays

• Assembly Level Machine Organization

  • Basic organization of the von Neumann machine

  • Control unit; instruction fetch, decode, and execution

  • Instruction sets and types (data manipulation, control, I/O)

  • Assembly/machine language programming

ACM KA Learning outcomes:

Digital Logic and Digital Systems

1. Describe the progression of computer technology components from vacuum tubes to VLSI, from mainframe computer architectures to the organization of warehouse-scale computers. [Familiarity]

2. Comprehend the trend of modern computer architectures towards multi-core and that parallelism is inherent in all hardware systems. [Familiarity]

3. Explain the implications of the “power wall” in terms of further processor performance improvements and the drive towards harnessing parallelism. [Familiarity]

4. Articulate that there are many equivalent representations of computer functionality, including logical expressions and gates, and be able to use mathematical expressions to describe the functions of simple combinational and sequential circuits. [Familiarity]

5. Design the basic building blocks of a computer: arithmetic-logic unit (gate-level), registers (gate-level), central processing unit (register transfer-level), memory (register transfer-level). [Usage]

6. Use CAD tools for capture, synthesis, and simulation to evaluate simple building blocks (e.g., arithmeticlogic unit, registers, movement between registers) of a simple computer design. [Usage]

7. Evaluate the functional and timing diagram behavior of a simple processor implemented at the logic circuit level. [Assessment]