Computer Organization and Architecture

Fairly straightforward. Take up any standard book on logic circuits and get done with section A. For B,C and D, I think Computer Organization and Design by Hennessy and Patterson will be good enough. They also have a decent appendix on logic design.

Expect around 14 questions from this section

A. Logic design (~ 2 questions)

  1. Implementation of combinational and sequential circuits
  2. Functional properties of digital integrated circuits

B. Processors and control units (~ 4 questions)

  1. Instruction sets
  2. Register and ALU organization
  3. Number representation
  4. Control sequencing
  5. Data Paths

C. Memories and their hierarchies (~ 3 questions)

  1. Speed, capacity, cost, allocation
  2. Cache, main, secondary storage
  3. Virtual memory, paging, segmentation

D. Communication (~ 3 questions)

  1. Bus, switch, and network structures and protocols
  2. I/O
  3. Synchronization

E. High-performance architectures (~ 2 questions)

  1. Pipelining super-scalar and out-of-order execution processors
  2. Parallel computing
  3. Distributed computing

humble servant

First Update Aug 21 2001

Last Update Aug 21 2001