Computer architecture

In computer engineering, computer architecture is the conceptual design and fundamental operational structure of a computer system. It is a blueprint and functional description of requirements (especially speeds and interconnections) and design implementations for the various parts of a computer — focusing largely on the way by which the central processing unit (CPU) performs internally and accesses addresses in memory.

Once both ISA and microarchitecture has been specified, the actual device needs to be designed into hardware. This design process is often called implementation. Implementation is usually not considered architectural definition, but rather hardware design engineering.

More specific usages of the term include more general wider-scale hardware architectures, such as cluster computing and Non-Uniform Memory Access (NUMA) architectures.