The Computing Technology Inside Your Smartphone

We use our smartphones to communicate, to organize our lives, to find information, and to entertain ourselves. All of this is possible because a smartphone contains a powerful computer processor, which is the subject of this course. This computer science course starts by moving step-by-step through the fundamental layers of computing technology, from binary numbers to application software, and then covers advanced performance techniques and the details of actual smartphone processors.

Learn about:

• Digital logic
• Computer organization
• Instruction sets
• Application Software
• Advanced performance techniques
• Actual smartphone processors

This Course also provides students with the technical knowledge and the Jade design tool experience to succeed in the more advanced MITx 6.004 MOOC - Computation Structures course sequence.

• Describe how a smartphone processor works
• Explain computer system design from binary information to programming
• Design a small working computer
• Describe common techniques used to make computers fast

Week 1: Introduction and Digital Logic

• Overview
• Inside Smartphone
• Big Ideas
• Numbers

Week 2: Digital Logic (cont'd)

• Operations
• Transistors and Gates

Week 3: Digital Logic (cont'd)

• Muxes and Decoders
• Adders

Week 4: Digital Logic(cont'd)

• Storage
• Finite State Machines

Week 5: Computer Organization

• Stored Program Computer
• LC-3 Instructions
• LC-3

Week 6: Computer Organization (cont'd)

• Instructional Set Architecture
• ISA 2

Week 7: Computer Organization (cont'd)

• ARM ISA
• LC-3 Control

Week 8: Programming

• Programming to Solve Problems
• Assembly Language
• Input/Output (I/O)
• C Programming

Week 9: Performance

• Pipelining
• Hazards
• Instruction Level Parallelism
• Thread Level Parallelism
• Data Level Parallelism

Week 10: Performance (cont'd)

• Caches
• Multicore
• Permanent Storage
• Snapdragon
• Conclusion