Computers are integrated part of our daily life and jobs. As a first step in becoming a computer designer or even in writing better software, understanding the hardware layers together with software interface of a computer is critical. In this course, we will learn about the basics of computer system organization, performance and energy issues, and instruction set architectures. We will study macro-coding concepts, hardware and micro-programmed control for single- and multi-cycle datapath. Introductory knowledge of pipelined processors and I/O organizations will be covered in the last part of the course.