Principles of computer design and cost/performance factors; instruction set design and implementation, RISC vs. CISC instruction sets; control unit and pipeline design; floating-point arithmetic; memory hierarchy designs, caches, memory interleaving, virtual memory; I/O device interconnections to CPUs and main memory. Additional topics include parallel system designs, SIMD, MIMD, SPMD; interconnection networks for processors and memories; optimization of pipeline operations; superscalar architectures, power management techniques.