Abstract : (seminar) Over the past four decades the computer industry has experienced four generations of development, physically marked by the rapid changing of building blocks
from relays and vacuum tubes (1940-1950s) to discrete diodes and transistors
(1950-1960s), to small- and medium-scale integrated (SSI/MSI) circuits (1960-1970s),
and to large- and very-large-scale integrated (LSI/VLSI) devices (1970s and beyond).
Increases in device speed and reliability and reductions in hardware cost and physical
size have greatly enhanced computer performance. However, better devices are not the
sole factor contributing to high performance. Ever since the stored-program concept of
von Neumann, the computer has been recognized as more than just a hardware
organization problem. A modern computer system is really a composite of such items as
processors, memories, functional units, interconnection networks, compilers, operating
systems, peripherals devices, communication channels, and database banks. To design a powerful and cost-effective computer system and to devise efficient programs to solve a computational problem, one must understand the underlying hardware and software system structures and the computing algorithm to be implemented on the machine with some user-oriented programming languages. These disciplines
constitute the technical scope of computer architecture. Computer architecture is really a
system concept integrating hardware, software algorithms, and languages to perform
large computations. A good computer architect should master all these disciplines. It is
the revolutionary advances in integrated circuits and system architecture that have
contributed most to the significant improvement of computer performance during the past
40 years. In this section, we review the generations of computer systems and indicate the
general tends in the development of high performance computers.