Computer Architecture Essentials — Part I: Performance Evaluation

This article is a part of the Learning notes series — Computer architecture Essentials, which summarizes some of the key concepts I learnt about Computer architecture. In this article, a gentle introduction of computer architecture and the related performance evaluation metrics will be given.

What is Computer architecture?

Computer architecture is a subfield of Computer Engineering that is about balancing the performance, efficiency, cost, and reliability of a computer system. It’s really about making a tradeoff between different factors during the design process in order to build much more advance computer.

Let’s look at the following figure, the layer of abstraction shows that the higher layer has lower complexity and the lower layer has a higher complexity. From my point of view, the focus of computer architecture from assembly language to the logic gate level, sitting at the middle of the abstraction. It implies that this subject cannot be naively classified as belonging to the software domain or the hardware domain, but it is at the intersection point of these two areas, which means that we have to apply the theory and tools in both areas in order to achieve our goal — makes computer BETTER.