Computer Science 237 Computer Organization Williams College Fall 2006

Agenda

• Announcements
  • Computer Science Colloquium, Fridays 2:30 PM, TCL 206. This week: welcome back party. Join us!
• Course overview
  • Why take CS 237?
  • Levels of abstraction:

    0.

    digital logic - electrical circuits to logic gates

    1.

    conventional machine language

    2.

    assembly language

    3.

    operating system

    4.

    conventional programming languages

  • Some don't quite fit in:

    3.5

    virtual machines

    4.5

    interpreted languages

  • Major course topics:
    • digital logic
    • microarchitecture and instruction set architecture
    • assembly language programming
    • higher-level computer organization topics (cache, virtual memory)
• Syllabus and Course Ground Rules
• Other Introductory Notes
• Numbers

Examples

Class examples will be listed in this section of each lecture's notes, and can be found in /usr/cs-local/share/cs237/examples on the CSLab FreeBSD systems.

• late - late penalty calculator Graph of the output: