School of Computing and Information Technology A Case for Teaching Computer Architecture

Both national and international professional bodies acknowledge computer architecture and organisation as an inherent part of computer science body of knowledge. Despite that fact computer architecture and organisation courses, especially at an advanced level, are disappearing from the computer science academic curricula of many Australian universities. In this paper we attempt to identify the reasons why this happens, and we argue against this trend. We present our approach to teaching an advanced computer architecture course, in such a way that it is relevant to the students’ future professional life, and can also be implemented without specialised resources. We also describe the experience of delivering this course to undergraduate computer science students over a period of three years.