ADVANCED COMPUTER ARCHITECTURE

1.Explain the fundamentals of computer Design?

           Computer technology has made incredible progress in the roughly from last 55 years. This rapid rate of improvement has come both from advances in the technology used to build computers and from innovation in computer design. During the first 25 years of electronic computers, both forces made a major contribution; but beginning in about 1970, computer designers became largely dependent upon integrated circuit technology. During the 1970s, performance continued to improve at about 25% to 30% per year for the mainframes and minicomputers that dominated the industry.

             The late 1970s after invention of microprocessor the growth roughly increased 35% per year in performance. This growth rate, combined with the cost advantages of a mass-produced microprocessor, led to an increasing fraction of the computer business. In addition, two significant changes are observed in computer industry.

• First, the virtual elimination of assembly language programming reduced the need for object-code compatibility.
• Second, the creation of standardized, vendor-independent operating systems, such as UNIX and its clone, Linux, lowered the cost and risk of bringing out a new architecture.

These changes made it possible to successfully develop a new set of architectures, called RISC (Reduced Instruction Set Computer) architectures. In the early 1980s. The RISC-based machines focused the attention of designers on two critical performance techniques, the exploitation of instruction-level parallelism and the use of caches. The combination of architectural and organizational enhancements has led to 20 years of sustained growth in performance at an annual rate of over 50%. Figure 1.1 shows the effect of this difference in performance growth rates.

The effect of this dramatic growth rate has been twofold.

• First, it has significantly enhanced the capability available to computer users. For many applications, the highest performance microprocessors of today outperform the supercomputer of less than 10 years ago.

• Second, this dramatic rate of improvement has led to the dominance of micro-processor-based computers across the entire range of the computer design.