8 Great Ideas in Computer Architecture

Page 33 of the pdf.

• Design for Moore’s Law
• Use Abstraction to simplify design
• Make the common case fast
• Performance via Parallelism (think about things running in parallel)
• Performance via Pipelining (think about things quickly running one after the other)
• Performance via Prediction (Hardware)
  • It can be faster on average to guess and start working rather than wait until you know for sure, assuming that the mechanism to recover from a misprediction is not too expensive and your prediction is relatively accurate.
  • Caching is probably the most important example of this
• Hierarchy of memories → Memory Hierarchy
• Dependability via Redundancy