COMPUTERS AND MORE

Computer architects concern themselves with techniques which will improve the performance and/or reduce the cost of computer systems. Over the years changes in technology have played a major role in providing these improvements, but a whole variety of different architectural techniques has been developed to take advantage of these changes. Most of these techniques involve some form of concurrency, either temporal or spatial. The prime example of the former is pipelining, while the latter includes the use of multiple execution units and, increasingly, multiple processors. Systems and applications programmers need to understand something about these various techniques in order to be able to select appropriate hardware platforms and to obtain maximum performance from them. A brief introduction to some of these techniques, and their history, is given below.