Design and Operation of Modern Computer Systems

This course provides a thorough understanding of the fundamental principles and practical aspects of Design and Operation of Modern Computer Systems. It explores how computer systems are structured and how they execute instructions at various levels of abstraction—from digital logic up to the instruction set architecture. The course focuses on the design and functionality of the hardware components that form the basis of modern computing systems.

Topics include number systems and data representation, instruction set design, central processing unit organization, memory hierarchy (cache, Random Access Memory, virtual memory), input/output systems, control unit design, pipelining, parallelism, and an introduction to advanced architectures like Reduced Instruction Set Computer, Complex Instruction Set Computer, superscalar, and multicore systems. With Pipelining, The speed of the controller will get increased. This means that the performance of the controller is improved. If the number of stages in the instruction is increased, the performance will be much better. But at the same time, the complexity of the system will be more. The cache memory will be used to increase the speed with which the data can be accessed. Getting the data from main memory always may degrade the performance of the controller. It is because most of the time is spent in accessing the data. Thus, using cache also automatically improves the performance of the controller system.