Intro to COA

Computer Organization and Architecture

Before learning the concepts of Computer Organization and Architecture, you must have a basic knowledge of Computer units and their Architecture, etc. The computer organization and architecture syllabus is based on computer hardware and Software.

Elements of Computer Organization and Architecture

There are three significant elements of computer organization and architecture. Explained below

1. Computer Hardware’s

Computer hardware consists of electronic circuits (i.e., CPU), displays (i.e., Monitors), Magnetic and optical storage (i.e., Hard disk), and communication facilities (i.e., Internet wires, system buses).

2. Computer Organization

Computer organization is the primary concern with the physical design of the system. As

  • Design of Main Memory: it tells about the capacity of RAM
  • Design of Busses: How much data can be transferred at a time through busses
  • CPU Design: Single or Multicore core CPUs, Multi-programming or Multitasking CPU.

3. Computer Architecture

It is also known as the instruction set architecture. Its primary concern is logical calculations, i.e., memory organization, registers, instruction sets, and exceptional handling (i.e., interrupts). Instruction set Architecture is visible to the programmer. Two main approaches are used for instruction set architecture

  • RISC (Reduced instruction set computer)
  • CISC (Complex instruction set computer

For example, if a system wants to perform a simple addition operation, then the need for CPU, memory, and ALU is computer architecture, and how the addition operation will perform on the data Is the computer organization.

Evolution of Computing Devices

The first computing system was designed in early 1940, known as ENIAC (Electronic Numerical Integrator and Computer), and vacuum tubes were used.

Following are the five computer generations, history from 1940 to date are

  • First Generation (1940 to 1956): Vacuum Tubes
  • Second Generation (1956 to 1963): Transistors
  • Third Generation (1964 to 1971): Integrated Circuits
  • Fourth Generation (1972 to 2010): Microprocessors
  • Fifth Generation (2010): Artificial Intelligence

Basic Functional Units of Computers

Following are the primary operations of computers are

Basic Computer Operations

The primary operations of computers are

  • Load a program into main memory from secondary memory.
  • Fetch, decode and execute the instructions from the main memory
  • Control the execution by the control unit
  • Processed data and results displayed on the output device.