The theoretical design and structure of a computer is known as computer architecture in the study of computer engineering. Computer architecture is basically a plan in which the descriptions of the design of a computer system are discussed. It is a very important section in computer science . It includes the designs of various parts of a computer. The computer architecture of a particular system will provide you the information regarding its speed, interconnections and many more important facts about the outlay of the computer system. The primary concern of computer architecture is the facts about the central processing unit or CPU of a computer and other hardware parts.
The sub categories in computer architecture:
There are three primary sections in computer architecture. These are Instruction set architecture or ISA, System Design and Microarchitecture or computer organization. Here Instruction set architecture discusses about the programming languages of a computer system. It is in fact a list of information.
In the Instruction set architecture you will get the information regarding instruction set, processor registers, memory address modes, and so on.
On the other hand, the Microarchitecture discusses about facts like various electrical electronic equipments of a computer, central processing unit, digital signal processor and so on.
Lastly, System Design discusses about the several hardware equipments such as computer buses and switches, memory controllers and hierarchies, etc. it also deals with the issues like multi-processing and direct memory access of CPU.
The motives of computer architecture:
The primary concerns of computer architecture are the price and the performance of the computer systems. Both of these must have a balance so that the customers remain satisfied. Here performance of a computer signifies the speed of the system. Some other aspects that computer architecture is concerned about are the feature set, weight, reliability, size, expandability, power consumption, etc.
