Computer Architecture: Educational Book

Résumé

Computer Architecture is an educational book aimed primarily at undergraduate computer science students and learners in vocational training. It presents a progressive introduction to computer architecture, beginning with the historical evolution of computer generations and the basic organization of a computer system: hardware, software, CPU, memory, input/output units, peripherals, and buses. The first chapter focuses on Von Neumann architecture, the CPU, ALU, control unit, registers, memory organization, instruction cycles, instruction formats, addressing modes, and basic 80x86 assembly concepts. The second chapter studies the external architecture of the MIPS R3000 microprocessor, including visible and protected registers, user and supervisor modes, memory addressing, segmentation, instruction formats, arithmetic and logical operations, branches, jumps, and load/store instructions. The book then introduces synchronous finite-state automata, explaining Moore and Mealy models through sequence-detection examples. A later chapter connects these automata principles to the internal architecture of the MIPS R3000, emphasizing processor-memory interface, datapath, control unit, micro-instructions, and sequencing. The final section offers practical work using DOS DEBUG and Turbo Assembler, helping readers apply low-level programming, register inspection, memory tracing, and simple assembly exercises. The tone is instructional and practice-oriented, suitable for foundational university-level learning.