Computer technology is making great progress everyday. From as big as a room sized computers, we have reached at the point in time where some computer can’t be seen using naked eyes and can go into human body to perform surgeries without him even realizing it. We have reached at a point in time where computer no longer have a fixed physical description. Like a amoeba, computer today have no fixed size and shape. It is tied to your wrist in the form of a smart watch, and it is attached on almost everything in the form of Internet of Things devices.

Computers came a long way to this never ending journey. Improvements in fabrication technologies and computer architecture have driven these incredible changes and thus are responsible for enhancement in performance. Performance, which equates today’s smartphone to the supercomputers of just twenty years back.

This course describes all the challenges computer architects faced and are still facing in an attempt to make computers more power efficient and high performing than ever. Many technologies, like Internet, have came and stabilized, but computer architecture have seen and still seeing great amount of change every single months and that’s the reason you are seeing hardware vendors like Qualcomm, HiSilicon, Samsung are launching new chip-sets for different classes of computers almost every new month. Hence, it becomes very important to understand the specs of each new computer, which further requires knowledge of measurements that are essential for design and analysis of computer architecture.