At UT Austin, undergraduate electrical and computer engineering students spend roughly the first half of the first semester building up from bits/binary to transistors to logic gates to latches and flip flops and registers. The second half of the semester finally moves on to understanding a "toy" ISA called the Little Computer 3, or LC3, and writing programs in its assembly language.
It's a much sharper and better motivated method to teach computer architecture, in my opinion.
It's a much sharper and better motivated method to teach computer architecture, in my opinion.