The Eight Great Ideas in Computer Architecture

List the 8 great ideas in Computer Architecture

1. Design for Moore's Law

2. Use Abstraction to Simplify Design

3. Make the Common Case Fast

4 Performance via Parallelism

5. Performance via Pipelining

6. Performance via Prediction

7. Hierarchy of Memories

8. Dependability via redundancy

Moore's Law

The economic rule that states that integrated circuit resources double every 18-24 months.

What does it mean to design for Moore's Law?

The idea that computer architects must design for rapid change.

Abstraction

Reducing information and detail to focus on essential characteristics.

What does it mean to use abstraction to simplify design?

The major productivity technique that computer architects can use to design at different levels of representation; lower level details are hidden to offer a simpler model at higher levels

Why should a computer architect make the common case fast?

This tends to enhance performance better than optimizing the rare case--and it's often simpler and easier to enhance

Parallelism

A performance optimization technique in which multiple operations are done in parallel

Pipelining

A form of parallelism in which a process begins executing before the previous process is complete

What is performance via prediction?

The idea that in some cases it can be faster on average to guess and start working rather than wait until you know for sure assuming that the mechanism to recover from misprediction is not too expensive and your prediction is relatively accurate

What is the Hierarchy of Memories?

The technique to get fast, large, and cheap memory by placing the fastest, smallest, and most expensive memory per bit at the top of the hierarchy and the slowest, largest, and cheapest per bit at the bottom. This gives a programmer the illusion that main memory is as cheap as the bottom of the hierarchy

What is Dependability through redundancy?

It's the idea to include redundant components that can take over when failure occurs and to help detect failures