Computer Organisation and Architecture

This is a foundation module whose main focus is on the characteristics and development of relatively high level ‘building’ blocks of a computer system. The highest level learning objective is to make clear how a computer program written in text is actually ‘executed’ by a computer, regardless of it being a mainframe, desktop or embedded system.

A myriad of basic lower level topics includes explaining how a central processor operates, the characteristics of different memory subsystems, data representations and measurements of system performance will be covered. There will be a special emphasis on IoT and embedded system architecture, in particular the computational and resource constraints in IoT platforms such as ARM MBed, Raspberry Pi, Arduino and Intel Galileo.