| Overview of computer    organization – components and system buses; Concepts of assembly and machine    language programs. Machine language program execution – instruction cycles,    machine cycles and bus cycles. Overview of memory and I/O addressing; CPU    organization – components and subsystems, register banks, internal bus    structure, information flow; Instruction set – characteristics and functions,    types of operation and operands. Addressing modes – various ways of    addressing memory and input-output devices and their timing characteristics;    CISC and RISC architectures – examples; ALU – flags, logical operations,    fixed point number representations and arithmetic, floating point number    representations and arithmetic, exceptions. Control Unit – how it operates,    hardwired control unit, concepts of microprograms and microprogrammed control    unit; Memory hierarchy – main memory – types and interfacing; Cache memory –    its organizations and operations, levels of caches; Memory management module    – paging and segmentation, virtual memory; Disk memory, RAIDs. Back-up    memory. Interrupts and interrupt structures – interrupt cycles, handling    multiple simultaneous interrupts, programmable interrupt controllers; I/O    interfacing and modes of I/O data transfer. Direct memory access – DMA    controller; Instruction level parallelism – instruction  pipelining , pipeline hazards; Concepts of    multiprocessor systems; Examples will be drawn from real life RISC and CISC    processors. |