Analog vs. Digital

Mechanical, Pneumatic, Hydraulic, Electrical-mechanical, Electronic.

CPU design

• Number and tasks of registers.
• Transistor logic - NMOS, CMOS, etc.
• Computational logic.

• Address range and unit size (bus width) accessed by CPU, I/O bus, etc..
• Size of memory chips, how addresses are decoded.
• Caching and Virtualization (simulation) of available memory.

• DRAM, SDRAM, SRAM, FLASH

• Mechanical (punch), Magnetic, Optical, Solid State.
• Layout of data on storage, address-ability, encoding of data for error protection and timing issues. Encrypting of data for security.

Refers to logical configuration of a system from a particular viewpoint. When describing a system, multiple architectural views may be presented.

Architectural view of a MIPS CPU instruction pipeline.

What is the sizes and types of data are recognized?

What functions are available?

How many work registers appear to exist in the CPU for the program?

Are work registers even visible for a specific programming language?

What is the syntax and structure of the language encoding the algorithms?

How to reference storage? (directory structure/file-name protocols)