Computer Architecture

Every line of code you write eventually becomes electricity. This course explains exactly how that happens.

Computer Architecture bridges the gap between software and hardware the layer most developers never see but always depend on. You'll start at the lowest level (transistors and logic gates), build up through number systems and circuits, and arrive at a full picture of how a CPU fetches, decodes, and executes your code. Along the way you'll understand why cache matters, what a pipeline hazard is, and why some programs are faster than others on the exact same machine.

This isn't a theory course. Every concept connects directly to something a programmer or engineer encounters in the real world.

What you'll cover:

• Digital signals, transistors, clock cycles, and voltage logic
• Binary, hexadecimal, two's complement, and floating-point numbers
• Logic gates, Boolean algebra, adder circuits
• CPU internals: registers, ALU, fetch-decode-execute cycle, pipelining
• Memory hierarchy: SRAM, DRAM, cache, virtual memory
• I/O systems, buses, interrupts, and DMA
• Performance metrics: CPI, Amdahl's Law, bottleneck analysis
• Instruction Set Architecture (ISA) and reading assembly

Who this is for: Computer science students, self-taught developers curious about what's "under the hood," and anyone preparing for systems-level roles or low-level programming.

Prerequisites: Basic comfort with binary numbers helps but isn't required. No programming experience is assumed though if you write code, this course will change how you think about it.