| 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 micro programmed 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. |