Prerequisites: CS 326 and CS 419 or permission of the instructor. (First semester—odd years/3 credits)
An in-depth study of architectural concepts and principles including performance-based design tradeoffs. Topics to be covered include: instruction set design, arithmetic algorithms, hardwired and microprogrammed control, memory hierarchy design, input/output, pipelines, RISC, CISC, vector processors, parallel processors and superscalar machines.