• Level: Juniors
• Prerequisites: CPEG 210 Digital Logic Design
• Lecture Times:  UTR 09:00 a.m. – 09:50 a.m. (Section 1), UTR 10:00 a.m. – 10:50 a.m. (Section 2)
• Classroom: B 105 (ECL)
• AY / Semester:  2010 – 2011 / Spring
• Professor:  Dr. I. Damaj
• Contact Details: idamaj@auk.edu.kw
• Course Detailed Site:  http://lms.auk.edu.kw
  
• Professor's Website: http://www.idamaj.net
  
• Summary of Assessment Method:  Two tests, pop quizzes, assignments, and a final exam
  
• Textbook: Computer Organization and Design: the Hardware/Software Interface, David A. Patterson and John L. Hennessy, Fourth Edition, Morgan Kaufmann Publishers, 2009.
  
• Software Tools: Quartus, SPIM Simulator, Intel Development Suite
  
• References: Digital Design, 4th edition, M. Mano and M. Ciletti, Pearson International Edition, 2007 Carl Hamacher, Zvonko Vranesic, and Safwat Zaky, Computer Organization, Fifth Edition, McGraw-Hill, 2002 Introduction to Parallel Processing: Algorithms and Architectures. Behrooz Parhami, Plenum 1999
  

The fundamental elements of digital logic and their use in computer construction; register level description of computer execution and the functional organization of a computer; essential elements of computer architecture; major functional components of a modern computer system. Design principles associated with modern computer architectures; performance and cost considerations; architectural features influenced by such features as operating systems and window systems, high level languages, etc; floating point arithmetic, performance of computer systems, processor implementation strategies, micro-programming, pipelining, CISC and RISC, vector processors; memory hierarchy, cache, virtual memory organization for high performance machines; An brief introduction to I/O and bus subsystems. Prerequisite: CPEG 210.

At the end of this course the students will be able to:

• Understand the basic organization of modern computer systems
• Analyze computer system performance
• Understand how computer programs are organized, stored, and executed at the machine level
• Write basic assembly language programs
• Perform fixed- and floating-point arithmetic computations
• Analyze an instruction-set architecture and propose a suitable datapath and control unit implementations
• Understand how instruction pipelining enhances processor performance
• Understand the basic organization of the memory hierarchy
• Analyze memory performance
• Understand the input/output mechanisms used to connect computers to their external environments