Upon completion of this course, students should be able to:

1. Describe the high-level organization of a computer system in terms of its major components
2. Use performance metrics and perform basic performance calculations using the"Performance Equation" described in the text.
3. Describe how instructions are represented in memory and the operation of the processor fetch/execute cycle.
4. Describe the characteristics of different instruction sets, and be able to read and write short assembly-language programs in a specifiic architecture (MIPS).
5. Describe how computer systems represent different data types (i.e. integer, floating point, characters, etc.) , and be able to convert between these representations.
6. Design arithmetic circuits including adders, subtractors, ALUs, multipliers, and dividers.
7. Describe the general process used to create a processor design from an instruction set specification.
8. Design, modify, and analyze processor implementations using the single-cycle, multiple cycle, and pipelined implementation schemes.
9. Describe the basic technologies used in modern memory systems (e.g., dynamic RAM, static RAM) and their impact on processor design and performance.
10. Describe the concept of a memory hierarchy, including cache, main memory, and virtual memory.
11. Describe the different approaches used for implementing processor I/O subsystems.
12. Describe the basic organization and operation of multiprocessor and multicore computer systems.