Computer technology has made incredible improvement in the past half century. In the early part of computer evolution, there were no stored-program computer, the computational power was less and on the top of it the size of the computer was a very huge one.
Today, a personal computer has more computational power, more main memory,more disk storage, smaller in size and it is available in effordable cost.
This rapid rate of improvement has come both from advances in the technology used to build computers and from innovation in computer design. In this course we will mainly deal with the innovation in computer design.
The task that the computer designer handles is a complex one: Determine what attributes are important for a new machine, then design a machine to maximize performance while staying within cost constraints.
This task has many aspects, including instruction set design, functional organization, logic design, and imple mentation.
While looking for the task for computer design, both the terms computer organization and computer architecture come into picture.