| abstract | - Computer architecture is the theory behind the design of a computer. In the same way as a building architect sets the principles and goals of a building project as the basis for the draftsman's plans, so too, a computer architect sets out the computer architecture as a basis for the actual design specifications. There are several usages of the term, which can be used to refer to:
* The design of a computer's CPU architecture, instruction set, addressing modes, and techniques such as SIMD and MIMD parallelism.
* More general wider-scale hardware architectures, such as cluster computing and Non-Uniform Memory Access (NUMA) architectures.
* The less formal usage refers to a description of the requirements (especially speeds and interconnection requirements) or design implementation for the various parts of a computer. (Such as memory, motherboard, electronic peripherals, or most commonly the CPU.)
* Architecture is often defined as the set of machine attributes that a programmer should understand in order to successfully program the specific computer (i.e., being able to reason about what the program will do when executed). For example, part of the architecture are the instructions and the width of operands manipulated by them. Similarly, the frequency at which the system operates is not part of the architecture. This definition reveals the two main considerations for computer architects: (1) Design hardware that behaves as the programmers think it should. (2) Utilize existing implementation technologies (e.g., semiconductors) to build the best computer possible (best can be defined in many different ways as described in Design Goals). The latter consideration is often referred to as microarchitecture.
- Computer architecture (also called hardware architecture) refers to
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