CSCI 250 — Computer Organization
This course introduces the hardware components of a computer. It focuses on their function, design, and performance characteristics, including discussions of recent developments. Students will examine the hardware-to-software interface, where high-level language statements are reduced to a sequence of assembly language statements, each of which represents a single primitive instruction of the processor. Students will learn binary and hexadecimal numbers and how variables, arithmetic/logic operations, branching, loops, arrays, and function calls are written in the "native language" of a microprocessor (in this case the MIPS R3000 32-bit RISC instruction set). Advanced topics include performance features such as processor caches and pipelining. Prerequisite(s): CSCI-110 Corequisite(s): CSCI-160