UNDERLINE THE VERB "TO BE" INCLUDING THE IMPERSONAL FORMS

COMPUTER ARCHITECTURE


In computer science, computer architecture or digital computer organization is the conceptual design and fundamental operational structure of a computer system. It is a blueprint and functional description of requirements and design implementations for the various parts of a computer.
It is also defined as the science and art of selecting and interconnecting hardware components to create computers that meet functional, performance and cost goals.
Computer architecture has three main subcategories:

1- Instruction set architecture, or ISA, is the abstract image of a computing system that is a machine language (or assembly language) programmer, including the instruction set, word size, memory address modes, processor registers, and address and data formats.

2- Microarchitecture, also Computer organization is a lower level, more concrete and detailed, description of the system. There are constituent parts of the system interconnected and they interoperate in order to implement the ISA. The size of a computer's cache for instance, is an organizational issue.

3. System Design: it is all of the other hardware components within a computing system such as:

--System interconnects such as computer buses and switches

-- Memory controllers and hierarchies

--CPU off-load mechanisms such as direct memory access (DMA)

--Issues like multiprocessing.

Adapted from http://www.wikipedia.org/, Abril 2010