Computer architecture: Difference between revisions

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'''Computer architecture''' refers to the theory behind the design of a computer. In the same way as a building architect sets the principles and goals of a building project as the basis for the draftsman's plans, so too, a computer architect sets out the Computer Architecture as a basis for the actual design specifications.

There are two customaryseveral usages of the term, which can be used to refer to:

The more academic usage refers to the design of a computer's underlying language - its "[[instruction set]]." This will include information such as whether the computer's processor can compute the product of two numbers without resorting to external memory. It will also include a nominal precision for the computer's computations.

The less formal usage refers to a description of the requirements (especially speeds and interconnection requirements) or design implimentation for the various parts of a computer. (Such as [[computer memory|memory]], [[motherboard]], [[electronic]] [[peripheral]]s, or most commonly the [[Central Processing Unit|CPU]].)

* The design of a computer's [[CPU architecture]] and [[instruction set]] and techniques such as [[SIMD]] and [[MIMD]] parallelism.

* More general wider-scale hardware architectures, such as [[cluster computing]] and [[NUMA]] architectures.

* The less formal usage refers to a description of the requirements (especially speeds and interconnection requirements) or design implimentationimplementation for the various parts of a computer. (Such as [[computer memory|memory]], [[motherboard]], [[electronic]] [[peripheral]]s, or most commonly the [[Central Processing Unit|CPU]].)

'''Design Goals'''