On successful completion of this subject, students should be able to:

1. Consider the Instruction Set Architecture (ISA) in order to carry out assembly programming tasks.
2. Examine the stored program concept and internal representation of different types of data.
3. Examine the memory hierarchy and how this relates to computer system performance.
4. Identify the hardware mechanisms that support interrupt handling and how the latter is used to implement I/O control.
5. Explain the structure of datapath and control as well as the basic instruction level parallelism using pipelining.
6. Critique fundamental issues in evaluating computer system performance.

1. Machine level representation of data including integer and floating point arithmetic, characters, and arrays; arithmetic and logical operations.
2. Assembly level machine organisation and assembly language programming including instruction set architecture, instruction formats, instruction execution cycle, addressing modes, subroutine call and return mechanisms.
3. Memory organisation and architecture including memory hierarchy, main memory, cache memories, virtual memory.
4. Types and characteristics of I/O devices, interfacing and communication within a computer system, physical organisation and performance of magnetic disks.
5. Hardware support for interrupts, programmed and interrupt-driven I/O, interrupt priority levels.
6. Pipelining and instruction level parallelism (ILP), pipeline hazards.
7. The basics of logic circuit design including fundamental building blocks and minimisation of logic expressions.
8. Functional level machine organisation, implementation of datapath and control unit.
9. Computer system performance measurements and benchmarking, Amdahl's law.