Course Goals and Requirements

Textbook:

Grading

Homework

There will be homework every week.   The purpose of the homework is to give you a chance to exercise the knowledge gained from the recent class material. Some exam questions will closely resemble homework problems. Most homework problems will come from the main text book. Each homework question will be worth up to three points.  One point for a modest, but reasonable attempt to answer the question, one more point for a good attempt that gets close to the solution, and one more point if the answer is correct.  Programming problems will be worth more points than standard homework problems.

In class exams

There will be three exams. The dates in the class schedule are tentative and we can change them if it appears in the best interest of the class.  Material on the tests will come from the text book and from supplementary materials and from class notes.

Article summaries (See also format information --- very important information)

In order to see what is current in the area of computer architecture, you will read and summarize two articles from recent literature. These may be articles in technical magazines or journals. They may be from Web sites. The articles must be at least three full pages long, not counting figures. In case of web pages, the amount of text must be equivalent to three magazine pages (three pages of very large font or very wide margins is not enough). The articles must be recent - not more than one year old. The articles must be relevant to the course. In particular, look for the characteristics of specific architectures, such as the latest Intel, Motorola or Sparc processors or new input/output or storage devices.  Articles about pipelining, RISC architecture, parallel machines,  memories, etc. are all appropriate. If you have any doubt about the suitablility of an article, let me look at it before you use it.

  Tentative Schedule

Logic Simulator

What's a design?

Levels of Learning

• The most basic is Knowledge, meaning that you have seen information and have retained it.  Each exam will have some questions that reflect the Knowledge level of competence in the material studied so far.
• The second level of competence is Comprehension.  This means understanding what you have read and heard and seen.  You can do more than recite what you have seen; you can do some manipulation of the information.  You can interpret, compare, translate to a new context, make small extensions to the information you have received.  Each exam will have some questions that reflect the Comprehension level of competence of the current material.
• The third level of comprehension is Application.  This means you can solve new problems by using the knowledge and comprehension you have acquired.  Most exams will have one or two questions at the Applicaton level of competence in the current material.
• The fourth level of competence is Analysis.  This means that you are able take apart what you know and deduce what the structure suggests.  You see all the parts that come together to form the whole and understand the way the ideas fit together.  Some exams will have questions that require analysis.
• The fifth level of competence is Synthesis.  This means that you so thoroughly understand the ideas and structures of a topic that you can generate new ideas based on what you know.  The only area where you will be expected to reach this level is in the representation of information in a computer.
• The sixth level of competence is Evaluation. This means that you are so thoroughly competent in this subject area that you are able to make judgments about the quality of your own and others' work.  You will evaluate new theories in the subject area and determine if they are likely to be good.  This is competence that will be beyond most people in a sophomore level course.

 

What the course is about

Sometimes, however, we must deal with the actual machine and its limitations and its perculiar characteristics.  We need to know how information is stored so that we can manipulate it most appropriately.  We ned to know how information gets to and from the peripheral devices so that we can interact with them in ways that make sense for our application.  We need to know how close we can come to having one machine do several things at the same time.  We need to know why our program does not always do what we thought we had specified.

This course is not a survey of hardware devices or an explanation of how things like DVD drives work.  It is concerned primarily with the processor and how it processes instructions on information stored in memory.

During this course, you will learn the C programming language.  It is introduced in a very special context:  First we learn about how 0s and 1s are used to represent information and instructions.  Then we see how electronic components operate under the direction of the 0s and 1s.  We look at machine language, a slightly more convenient way for people to talk about what the electronics are doing.  Then we look at assembly language, which allows us to give up some of the detail but still keep close to the actual machine operation.  Next, we look at C as a next step in making the art of communicating with a computer intelligible for humas.  C is a language that is a natural progression from machine and assembly language.  That is its strength and its weakness.  It is a strength because it gives you control of the computer in a way you don't easily have in other languages.  It is a weakness because there are more details you have to work through.  Because you have a year's experience in programming, you should find it relatively easy to learn C.  Learning to learn a new language is another useful product of this course.