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Difference Between Computer Organization & Computer Architecture

Computer architecture is the conceptual design and operational structure of a computer system. It includes the instruction set architecture, microarchitecture, and system design. Computer architecture also involves implementing the instruction set architecture and microarchitecture in hardware through logic, circuit, and physical implementation.

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37 views

Difference Between Computer Organization & Computer Architecture

Computer architecture is the conceptual design and operational structure of a computer system. It includes the instruction set architecture, microarchitecture, and system design. Computer architecture also involves implementing the instruction set architecture and microarchitecture in hardware through logic, circuit, and physical implementation.

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purvivaghela2003
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© © All Rights Reserved
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Download as DOCX, PDF, TXT or read online on Scribd
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Computer architecture is the conceptual design and fundamental operational structure of a

computer system. It is the technical drawings and functional description of all design requirements
(especially speeds and interconnections), it is how to design and implement various parts of a
computer — focusing largely on the way by which the central processing unit (CPU) operates
internally and how it accesses addresses in memory.
Computer architecture includes at least three main subcategories:
1. Instruction set architecture, or ISA, is the abstract model of a computing system that is
seen by a machine language (or assembly language) programmer, including the instruction
set, memory address modes, processor registers, and address and data formats.
2. Microarchitecture, also known as Computer organization is a lower level, detailed
description of the system that is sufficient for completely describing the operation of all parts
of the computing system, and how they are inter-connected and inter-operate in order to
implement the ISA. The size of a computer's cache for instance, is an organizational issue
that generally has nothing to do with the ISA.
3. System Design which includes all of the other hardware components within a computing
system such as:
● System interconnects such as computer buses and switches.
● Memory controllers and hierarchies.
● CPU off-load mechanisms such as direct memory access.
● Issues like multi-processing.

Once both ISA and microarchitecture has been specified, the actual computing system needs to be
designed into hardware. This design process is called implementation. Implementation is usually a
hardware engineering design process.
Implementation can be further broken down into three but not fully separate pieces:
● Logic Implementation: Design of blocks defined in the microarchitecture, mainly, at the
register-transfer and gate levels.
● Circuit Implementation: Transistor-level design of basic elements (gates, multiplexers,
flip-flops, etc.) as well as of some larger blocks (ALUs, caches etc.) that may be
implemented at this level, or even at a lower physical level, for performance reasons.
● Physical Implementation: Physical circuits are drawn out, the different circuit
components are placed in a chip floor-plan or on a board and the wires connecting them
are routed.
For CPUs, the entire implementation process is often called CPU design; it can also be a family of
related CPU designs, such as RISC and CISC.
Examples of computer architectures
● The x86, made by Intel and AMD.
● The SPARC, made by Sun Microsystems and others.
● The PowerPC, made by Apple, IBM, and Motorola.

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