Course Overview

In electronics engineering and computer engineering, computer architecture is a set of disciplines that describes a computer system by specifying its parts and their relations. Computer architects use computers to design new computers. Emulation software can run programs written in a proposed instruction set. While the design is very easy to change at this stage, compiler designers often collaborate with the architects, suggesting improvements in the instruction set. Modern emulators may measure time in clock cycles: estimate energy consumption in joules, and give realistic estimates of code size in bytes. These affect the convenience of the user, the life of a battery, and the size and expense of the computer’s largest physical part: its memory. That is, they help to estimate the value of a computer design.