SDC 306 - Computer Architecture

[posabsolute]

Hey guys,

So I know we have a  thread with a melting pot of information about the new SDC CS courses, however, it's kind of hard to gather all the info for a specific course.

On my side I just passed the Computer Architecture final exam, much easier than I thought it would be, I feel there are about 2 or 3 chapters that are more intensive, however the exam I got was kind of simple, using very small binary numbers for operations, easy logic gate questions, and a lot of questions where you need to just remember the answer. I slowed down the quizzes because of the holiday, which was an issue as far as remembering "by heart" answers. I still did a good score.

--

The assignment, however, is quite something, I don't find the course prepare you at all to do what they ask, I somewhat giving up, for now, trying to gather the info from the course and started looking at logicism tutorials for building CPU's on youtube.

I would say I'm at halfway of step 1 and 2, after 2 hours and I'm starting to slow down. My guess is this will take me about 10 to 15 hours to have something decent at this point.

[jsh1138]

The project/paper is always much harder than the coursework at Study.com, from what I've seen. UL courses tend to have easier coursework than LL ones, imo

[armstrongsubero]

The general trend for the CS courses on SDC is moderately challenging coursework, a rather simple final compared to the coursework and test of depth of knowledge in the assignment.

@posabsolute I also felt that the course does not prepare you, I used prior knowledge to pass thankfully I already build my own CPU and language in VHDL and programmed in binary, still it was no easy task, you will have to do a hack with the control unit though. I still manged to pass with flying colors!

Read this book, it will help a lot:

https://www.amazon.com/Digital-Electroni...lectronics

[Ideas]

10 to 15 doesn't seem too bad. I'll hope to finish in 15.

[bluebooger]

....

Read this book, it will help a lot:

https://www.amazon.com/Digital-Electroni...lectronics

this is also a good book         
https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0262640686/

its part of this course 

https://www.coursera.org/learn/build-a-computer 
https://www.coursera.org/learn/nand2tetris2

[posabsolute]

So, 5 hours into the assignment, I had to start my alu from scratch, I’m increment/decrement away from having the full step 1 and 2.

I’m still not totally clear on how the control unit wire with the ALU, re-reading the instruction I kind of feel there are things to read between the lines here, still looking at CPU tutorials.

I’m a bit pissed at this course, I did my fair share of UL courses at SDC (a lot of BUS + the new CS courses), never been in a situation where I need to rely so much on outside sources. I thought the database UL courses assignment was stupid easy, they basically give you the SQL queries to run, this is the complete opposite.

[jsh1138]

Study.com's computer courses are alot like their foreign language courses. It's more a test to see if you're already proficient vs teaching you how to do something. You can't learn programming from Study.com's programming courses, for instance.

[bjcheung77]

LOL, I just finished the finals for all three System Analysis & Design, Database Management, Computer Architecture.
I haven't started the assignments yet, but after reading this, I'll do Comp Architecture LAST of the three...

[posabsolute]

So I passed the course.

Around 12 hours on the assignment, a lot of that is just scraping the web on all the resources available for building 4bit and 8bit cpu's. I had to wrap up the course but one thing not clear in the assignment is how far you should take that CPU design so I basically did 90% of the assignment and I ended up having a passing grade on it.

I implemented a lot of stuff besides de ALU, including the registers, but I did not implement the Control Unit (did the state diagram tho), lack of understanding there, not worth enough points.

I feel I learned quite a lot, but it's a bit a bittersweet end to this course.

[armstrongsubero]

@posabsolute what was your final grade?

Yeah the CU requires an in depth knowledge and a little hack around.

Anyone coming from a pure software background without dabbling in computing prior because theu have a passion for it will find it impossible to complete the assignment because it will take more than 12 hours to learn everything required.

I'm curious what style of assembly language did you develop for your CPU what design did you use?