Class: CSE 120 Subject: computer-science abstraction Date: 2025-04-02 Teacher: **Prof. Nath
Eight Great Ideas in Computer Architecture
Moore’s Law
- Moore’s law states that integrated circuit resources double every 18-24 months.
- important because rather than designing based on where current circuit resources are, we can anticipate where they will be in the future.
Abstraction
- lower-level details are hidden as a means to offer a simpler model at higher levels
Make the Common Case Fast
- it’s actually more efficient to make the common case fast rather than optimizing the rare case
- analogy - it’s surely easier to make a fast sports car than a fast minivan!
Performance via Parallelism
- computing operations in parallel has led to more performance
Performance via Pipelining
- it’s subset of parallelism
- analogy - “For example, before fire engines, a “bucket brigade” would respond to a fire, which many cowboy movies show in response to a dastardly act by the villain. The townsfolk form a human chain to carry a water source to fire, as they could much more quickly move buckets up the chain instead of individuals running back and forth.”(p.g 56)