In computer science, computer architecture or digital computer organization is the conceptual

design and fundamental operational structure of a computer system. It is a blueprint and

functional description of requirements and design implementations for the various parts of a
computer, focusing largely on the way by which the central processing unit (CPU) performs
internally and accesses addresses in memory.
It may also be defined as the science and art of selecting and interconnecting hardware
components to create computers that meet functional, performance and cost goals.
Computer architecture comprises at least three main subcategories:[1]
Instruction set architecture, or ISA, is the abstract image of a computing system that is seen by a
machine language (or assembly language) programmer, including the instruction set, word size,
memory address modes, processor registers, and address and data formats.
Microarchitecture, also known as Computer organization is a lower level, more concrete and
detailed, description of the system that involves how the constituent parts of the system are
interconnected and how they interoperate in order to implement the ISA.[2] The size of a
computer's cache for instance, is an organizational issue that generally has nothing to do with the
ISA.
System Design which includes all of the other hardware components within a computing system
such as:
System interconnects such as computer buses and switches
Memory controllers and hierarchies
CPU off-load mechanisms such as direct memory access (DMA)
Issues like multiprocessing.
Once both ISA and microarchitecture have been specified, the actual device needs to be
designed into hardware. This design process is called implementation. Implementation is usually
not considered architectural definition, but rather hardware design engineering.
Implementation can be further broken down into three (not fully distinct) pieces:
Logic Implementation — design of blocks defined in the microarchitecture at (primarily) the
register-transfer and gate levels.
Circuit Implementation — transistor-level design of basic elements (gates, multiplexers, latches
etc) as well as of some larger blocks (ALUs, caches etc) that may be implemented at this level, or
even (partly) at the physical level, for performance reasons.
Physical Implementation — physical circuits are drawn out, the different circuit components are
placed in a chip floorplan or on a board and the wires connecting them are routed.
For CPUs, the entire implementation process is often called CPU design.
More specific usages of the term include more general wider-scale hardware architectures, such
as cluster computing and Non-Uniform Memory Access (NUMA) architectures
The Role Of Computer Architecture
Computer Architecture: The Definition
The coordination of abstract levels of a processor under changing forces, involving design,
measurement and evaluation.it also include the overall fundamental working principle of the
internal logical structure of a computer system.
[edit]Instruction Set Architecture
The ISA is the interface between the software and hardware.
It is the set of instructions that bridges the gap between high level languages and the hardware.
For a processor to understand a command, it should be in binary. The ISA encodes these values.
The ISA also defines the items in the computer that are available to a programmer. For example,
it defines data types, registers, addressing modes, memory organization etc.
register are high speed storage for numbers that can be accessed by a processor. Data as well
as instructions can be in a register.
Addressing modes are the way that an instructions are locates its operands.
Memory organization defines how instructions interact with the memory.
Computer Organization
Computer organization helps optimize performance-based products. For example, software
engineers need to know the processing ability of processors. They may need to optimize software
in order to gain the most performance at the least expense. This can require quite detailed
analysis of the computer organization. For example, in a multimedia decoder, the designers might
need to arrange for most data to be processed in the fastest data path.
Computer organization also helps plan the selection of a processor for a particular project.
Multimedia projects may need very rapid data access, while supervisory software may need fast
interrupts.
Sometimes certain tasks need additional components as well. For example, a computer capable
of virtualization needs virtual memory hardware so that the memory of different simulated
computers can be kept separated.
The computer organization and features also affect the power consumption and the cost of the
processor.
design goals
The exact form of a computer system depends on the constraints and goals for which it was
optimized. Computer architectures usually trade off standards, cost, memory capacity, latency
and throughput. Sometimes other considerations, such as features, size, weight, reliability,
expandability and power consumption are factors as well.
The most common scheme carefully chooses the bottleneck that most reduces the computer's
speed. Ideally, the cost is allocated proportionally to assure that the data rate is nearly the same
for all parts of the computer, with the most costly part being the slowest. This is how skillful
commercial integrators optimize personal computers.
[edit]Performance
Computer performance is often described in terms of clock speed (usually in MHz or GHz). This
refers to the cycles per second of the main clock of the CPU. However, this metric is somewhat
misleading, as a machine with a higher clock rate may not necessarily have higher performance.
As a result manufacturers have moved away from clock speed as a measure of performance.
Computer performance can also be measured with the amount of cache a processor has. If the
speed, MHz or GHz, were to be a car then the cache is like the gas tank. No matter how fast the
car goes, it will still need to get gas. The higher the speed, and the greater the cache, the faster a
processor runs.[dubious – discuss]
Modern CPUs can execute multiple instructions per clock cycle, which dramatically speeds up a
program. Other factors influence speed, such as the mix of functional units, bus speeds, available
memory, and the type and order of instructions in the programs being run.
There are two main types of speed, latency and throughput. Latency is the time between the start
of a process and its completion. Throughput is the amount of work done per unit time. Interrupt
latency is the guaranteed maximum response time of the system to an electronic event (e.g.
when the disk drive finishes moving some data). Performance is affected by a very wide range of
design choices — for example, pipelining a processor usually makes latency worse (slower) but
makes throughput better. Computers that control machinery usually need low interrupt latencies.
These computers operate in a real-time environment and fail if an operation is not completed in a
specified amount of time. For example, computer-controlled anti-lock brakes must begin braking
almost immediately after they have been instructed to brake.
The performance of a computer can be measured using other metrics, depending upon its
application domain. A system may be CPU bound (as in numerical calculation), I/O bound (as in a
webserving application) or memory bound (as in video editing). Power consumption has become
important in servers and portable devices like laptops.
Benchmarking tries to take all these factors into account by measuring the time a computer takes
to run through a series of test programs. Although benchmarking shows strengths, it may not help
one to choose a computer. Often the measured machines split on different measures. For
example, one system might handle scientific applications quickly, while another might play
popular video games more smoothly. Furthermore, designers have been known to add special
features to their products, whether in hardware or software, which permit a specific benchmark to
execute quickly but which do not offer similar advantages to other, more general tasks.
Power consumption
Main article: low-power electronics
Power consumption is another design criterion that factors in the design of modern computers.
Power efficiency can often be traded for performance or cost benefits. With the increasing power
density of modern circuits as the number of transistors per chip scales (Moore's law), power
efficiency has increased in importance. Recent processor designs such as the Intel Core 2 put
more emphasis on increasing power efficiency. Also, in the world of embedded computing, power
efficiency has long been and remains the primary design goal next to performance.