What is a computer system architecture? In computer engineering, computer architecture is a set of rules and methods that describe the functionality, organisation and implementation of computer systems. The architecture of a system refers to its structure in terms of separately specified components of that system and their interrelationships. Computer architecture is concerned with balancing the performance, efficiency, cost and reliability of a computer system. The case of instruction set architecture can be used to illustrate the balance of these competing factors. More complex instruction sets enable programmers to write more space efficient programs, since a single instruction can encode some higher-level abstraction. However, longer and more complex instructions take longer for the processor to decode and can be more costly to implement effectively. The increased complexity from a large instruction set also creates more room for unreliability when instructions interact in unexpected ways.

Saket Kumar

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