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Learning about CPU internals was a huge part of your first year in CS? Where did you go to school? At my school and every other school I'm remotely familiar wi

by 0xffff2 11y ago

Learning about CPU internals was a huge part of your first year in CS? Where did you go to school? At my school and every other school I'm remotely familiar with, the knowledge needed to emulate a CPU would be covered in upper division computer engineering courses, and not covered by CS undergrads at all, certainly not in their first year.

khedoros 11y ago
I got a solid understanding of CPU operations in my undergraduate computer architectures class, in my CS degree. Of course, it was probably a third year class. First year sounds a little unusual.
toyg 11y ago
Bologna, Italy (from the school of Science, not Engineering). At the time (16+ years ago, under prof. Renzo Davoli), the introductory "Computer Architecture" course [1] was almost entirely dedicated to CPU architecture, including building basic ones (IIRC). To be fair, I did drop out a year later :) [1] http://www.unibo.it/en/teaching/degree-programmes/study-plan/2015/8009 http://www.unibo.it/en/teaching/degree-programmes/study-plan...
- jcoffland 11y ago
  This kind of course (computer architecture) is typical of the cross CS/EE requirements and can usually be taken during any year of an undergraduate degree in CS. Prerequisites are minimal if any.
  - danjayh 11y ago
    I taught that class once. It does have some prerequisites, but not a ton. I think it could be taken as early as second year, first semester at that particular school.
Elv13 11y ago
Back in 2007, my first semester in a technical CS school had plenty of assembly, binary, MMU emulation, OSI / TCP/IP, boolean math and so on. I know this is mostly gone at this point, but it should not. The fundamentals are essentials. I often meet people who are totally clueless how a computer work and have CS degrees. "How can you do C, it is so old? By now, we must have invented faster languages. Computers changed so much recently". Sure... Binary is now expressed with emoji.
- cbd1984 11y ago
  Those aren't the fundamentals of CS. The fundamentals of CS are data structures and algorithms, as the Good Book says. Hardware is important, practically, but don't let practicality blind you to the actual core of the field: Practicality has a way of becoming obsolete, and an actual education is for life.
  - toyg 11y ago
    Meh. It's like saying that the fundamentals of film-making are writing and acting -- except writers and actors are nothing without an actual camera, and if you don't know how to place the camera and how to cut film produced by such camera, you will never get a film done. Cameras change, but you will never have a camera that miraculously materializes in all the right places to take exactly the shots you imagined. In the same way, some things will never change on the hardware side: you will always have inputs, outputs, memory, storage, human interfaces, power management, booting and so on.
    - cbd1984 11y ago
      The difference is that when people talk about hardware, they're talking about the equivalent of film, not abstract "this is central to being a camera which works with visible-spectrum light" concepts. > you will always have [...] > memory, storage First, making a distinction between memory and storage is not an "at all times, in all places" kind of thing. It's more "this is what we do now, in the past, on some systems, it was different, and it may be different in the future" kind of thing. Single-level storage is not currently popular, but it was in the past and may yet come back. It already has, in some limited contexts. Second, we've already seen home system storage go from paper tape to magnetic tape to magnetic disk to metallic magnetic disk to solid-state NAND Flash or close equivalent. Each has vastly different performance characteristics and details in every detail. > human interfaces I'm sure there are some iron-clad universals in HID. I don't know which of those translate from CLIs to touch-screens to gestural interfaces to speech recognition to pupil tracking to... > power management, booting Two things which have changed quite a bit even in the lifetime of "vaguely IBM PC-derived" desktop computers, and even moreso if you widen your scope up and down the power curve to include handheld systems and, you know, Real Computers What Do Real Work.
TYPE_FASTER 11y ago
First year, second semester we learned binary logic, system bus, how a CPU works, etc. I think it was seen as the foundation so you actually understand how a computer works.
eru 11y ago
I was equally shocked at the state of CS education at University of New South Wales here in Australia. They don't seem to cover many fundamentals (like CPU, algorithms and data structures, operating systems) compared to what I am used to in Europe. Either not at all in the undergrad curriculum or only very late.
- sotojuan 11y ago
  In my US school we don't even write our own compiler in programming languages class. Europeans seem to learn a ton more.
  - eru 11y ago
    I studied math at university, and did CS as a minor. They made me take data structure and algorithm classes for both. The mathematician's version was half as long, but covered the material in more depth: ie they proved every result. The CS version was full of dumbed down and full of fluff. (And even those CS people did operating systems and compilers as undergrads.)
stephenboyd 11y ago
We covered it in the first quarter of the CS program at The Evergreen State College. After a few weeks of being introduced to digital logic, each student had to draw (with an application called Logisim) a simulated simple-as-possible Von Neumann machine up from logic gates and wires. Then we had to write short math programs for them directly into the RAM. Fortunately, Logisim lets you save components as something like functions or macros so it wasn't too repetitive. This project demo video by someone who took the same course shows what the result looks like: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Z8qEz4DwFIg https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Z8qEz4DwFIg It was challenging, but it was awesome (and finding that video to illustrate my comment is a blast of nostalgia). It wasn't any harder than most other CS or other sciences courses. And after digital logic, the other CS topics aren't really prerequisite or especially helpful in learning how simple processors work. I really appreciated getting straight to the foundations of how computers work and building up from there. It wasn't like emulating x86 in javascript, but it was CPU internals. Up until I read your comment, I just assumed this was standard CS stuff.

by 0xffff2 11y ago

khedoros 11y ago

I got a solid understanding of CPU operations in my undergraduate computer architectures class, in my CS degree. Of course, it was probably a third year class. First year sounds a little unusual.

toyg 11y ago

Bologna, Italy (from the school of Science, not Engineering). At the time (16+ years ago, under prof. Renzo Davoli), the introductory "Computer Architecture" course [1] was almost entirely dedicated to CPU architecture, including building basic ones (IIRC). To be fair, I did drop out a year later :) [1] http://www.unibo.it/en/teaching/degree-programmes/study-plan/2015/8009 http://www.unibo.it/en/teaching/degree-programmes/study-plan...

jcoffland 11y ago
This kind of course (computer architecture) is typical of the cross CS/EE requirements and can usually be taken during any year of an undergraduate degree in CS. Prerequisites are minimal if any.
- danjayh 11y ago
  I taught that class once. It does have some prerequisites, but not a ton. I think it could be taken as early as second year, first semester at that particular school.

Elv13 11y ago

Back in 2007, my first semester in a technical CS school had plenty of assembly, binary, MMU emulation, OSI / TCP/IP, boolean math and so on. I know this is mostly gone at this point, but it should not. The fundamentals are essentials. I often meet people who are totally clueless how a computer work and have CS degrees. "How can you do C, it is so old? By now, we must have invented faster languages. Computers changed so much recently". Sure... Binary is now expressed with emoji.

cbd1984 11y ago
Those aren't the fundamentals of CS. The fundamentals of CS are data structures and algorithms, as the Good Book says. Hardware is important, practically, but don't let practicality blind you to the actual core of the field: Practicality has a way of becoming obsolete, and an actual education is for life.
- toyg 11y ago
  Meh. It's like saying that the fundamentals of film-making are writing and acting -- except writers and actors are nothing without an actual camera, and if you don't know how to place the camera and how to cut film produced by such camera, you will never get a film done. Cameras change, but you will never have a camera that miraculously materializes in all the right places to take exactly the shots you imagined. In the same way, some things will never change on the hardware side: you will always have inputs, outputs, memory, storage, human interfaces, power management, booting and so on.
  - cbd1984 11y ago
    The difference is that when people talk about hardware, they're talking about the equivalent of film, not abstract "this is central to being a camera which works with visible-spectrum light" concepts. > you will always have [...] > memory, storage First, making a distinction between memory and storage is not an "at all times, in all places" kind of thing. It's more "this is what we do now, in the past, on some systems, it was different, and it may be different in the future" kind of thing. Single-level storage is not currently popular, but it was in the past and may yet come back. It already has, in some limited contexts. Second, we've already seen home system storage go from paper tape to magnetic tape to magnetic disk to metallic magnetic disk to solid-state NAND Flash or close equivalent. Each has vastly different performance characteristics and details in every detail. > human interfaces I'm sure there are some iron-clad universals in HID. I don't know which of those translate from CLIs to touch-screens to gestural interfaces to speech recognition to pupil tracking to... > power management, booting Two things which have changed quite a bit even in the lifetime of "vaguely IBM PC-derived" desktop computers, and even moreso if you widen your scope up and down the power curve to include handheld systems and, you know, Real Computers What Do Real Work.

TYPE_FASTER 11y ago

First year, second semester we learned binary logic, system bus, how a CPU works, etc. I think it was seen as the foundation so you actually understand how a computer works.

eru 11y ago

I was equally shocked at the state of CS education at University of New South Wales here in Australia. They don't seem to cover many fundamentals (like CPU, algorithms and data structures, operating systems) compared to what I am used to in Europe. Either not at all in the undergrad curriculum or only very late.

sotojuan 11y ago
In my US school we don't even write our own compiler in programming languages class. Europeans seem to learn a ton more.
- eru 11y ago
  I studied math at university, and did CS as a minor. They made me take data structure and algorithm classes for both. The mathematician's version was half as long, but covered the material in more depth: ie they proved every result. The CS version was full of dumbed down and full of fluff. (And even those CS people did operating systems and compilers as undergrads.)

stephenboyd 11y ago

We covered it in the first quarter of the CS program at The Evergreen State College. After a few weeks of being introduced to digital logic, each student had to draw (with an application called Logisim) a simulated simple-as-possible Von Neumann machine up from logic gates and wires. Then we had to write short math programs for them directly into the RAM. Fortunately, Logisim lets you save components as something like functions or macros so it wasn't too repetitive. This project demo video by someone who took the same course shows what the result looks like: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Z8qEz4DwFIg https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Z8qEz4DwFIg It was challenging, but it was awesome (and finding that video to illustrate my comment is a blast of nostalgia). It wasn't any harder than most other CS or other sciences courses. And after digital logic, the other CS topics aren't really prerequisite or especially helpful in learning how simple processors work. I really appreciated getting straight to the foundations of how computers work and building up from there. It wasn't like emulating x86 in javascript, but it was CPU internals. Up until I read your comment, I just assumed this was standard CS stuff.