₹0 for students · Certificate · Beginner

How Computers Work

4 mini courses, 16 lessons: the CPU, what makes it fast, memory and I/O, and modern hardware

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16 lessons · ~3 hours · 30-question final exam · pass mark 70%

About the course

What you’ll learn

What actually happens when your code runs. Follow an instruction through the processor, see why caches, pipelines and multiple cores make programs fast (or slow), how memory, storage and devices connect, and how phones, GPUs and ARM chips changed the picture. You also simulate a tiny CPU and a cache in Python. Pass every lesson quiz and the final exam to earn a verifiable certificate.

Computer architectureCPUMemory hierarchyPerformanceHardware basics

Part of the career track: Computer Science Foundations

How the certificate works

  1. Read each lesson’s study guide, then the full lesson and any notebooks or exercises.
  2. Pass every lesson quiz with 70% or more.
  3. Pass the final exam: 30 questions in 45 minutes.
  4. Get a certificate with a public verification link, and add it to LinkedIn.

Syllabus

16 lessons in 4 mini courses

Each mini course takes about an hour. Already know one? Test out in the app and skip it.

1. Inside the CPU

Explain how a processor fetches, decodes and runs instructions.

1
The Stored-Program Computer
10 min · Von Neumann design: CPU, memory, I/O and buses.
2
Instructions and the ISA
10 min · The ISA is the hardware–software contract.
3
The Fetch–Decode–Execute Cycle
10 min · Fetch → decode → execute → write back, repeated billions of times.
4
Reading a Little Assembly
12 min · Assembly is one human-readable line per machine instruction.

2. Making it fast

Explain pipelines, caches, branch prediction and multicore, and write cache-friendly code.

5
Pipelining
10 min · Pipelining overlaps stages of different instructions.
6
Caches and the Memory Hierarchy
12 min · Main memory takes ~100 ns: hundreds of instructions' worth.
7
Branch Prediction and Speculation
10 min · Deep pipelines can't wait for every branch.
8
Multicore and Parallelism
12 min · The power wall stopped clock speeds rising around 2005.

3. Memory, storage and I/O

Describe how memory, storage and devices connect to the CPU.

9
Memory, Addresses and Endianness
10 min · Memory is a row of bytes with numbered addresses.
10
Storage: HDDs and SSDs
10 min · HDDs store bits magnetically on spinning platters; random reads ~10 ms.
11
I/O, Interrupts and DMA
10 min · Devices are controlled through registers, often memory-mapped.
12
Buses: PCIe, USB and Networks on a Chip
10 min · A bus or link carries data between components.

4. Modern hardware

Compare CPUs, GPUs and phone chips, and reason about speedups.

13
GPUs and Accelerators
10 min · CPUs: few powerful cores for fast single threads.
14
ARM, x86 and RISC-V
10 min · x86 is CISC with deep backward compatibility; it decodes to micro-ops.
15
Measuring Performance
12 min · Time = instructions × cycles per instruction × time per cycle.
16
Phones, SoCs and Energy
10 min · A system on a chip (SoC) combines CPU, GPU, NPU, modem and more.

Written by Vikosha. Lessons, questions and exercises are original. Licence: Original Vikosha course..