Learning Computer Architecture with Raspberry Pi

Introduction

WHEN I WAS 10 years old, one of my teachers sat me down in front of a computer at school. Now, this isn’t what you think. I wasn’t about to be inducted into the mysteries of computer programming, even though it was a BBC Micro (the most programmable and arguably the most architecturally sophisticated of the British 8-bit microcomputers, on which I would subsequently cut my teeth in BASIC and assembly language). Instead, I was faced with a half-hour barrage of multiple choice questions about my academic interests, hobbies and ambitions, after which the miraculous machine spat out a diagnosis of my ideal future career: microelectronic chip designer.

This was a bit of a puzzler, not least because what I really wanted to be was a computer game programmer (okay, okay, astronaut) and there was nobody in my immediate environment who had any idea what a 10-year-old should do to set him on the path to the sunlit uplands of microelectronic chip design. Over the next few years, I studied a lot of maths and science at school, learned to program (games) at home, first on the BBC Micro and then the Commodore Amiga, and made repeated, not particularly successful, forays into electronics. As it turned out, and more by luck than judgment, I’d happened on a plausible road to my destination, but it wasn’t until I arrived at Cambridge at the age of 18 that I started to figure out where the gaps were in my understanding.

Cambridge

Cambridge occupies a special place in the history of ...