Eight Weeks Inside the Machine in Your Pocket
Mobile Computer Architecture
DR. MICHAEL LITMAN, PH.D.
Master Computer Scientist
A desktop architect asks how fast it can go. A mobile architect asks four questions at once — how fast, at what energy, for how long before it throttles, and on which processor. Master those four and the whole strange shape of a phone becomes obvious.
An eight-week graduate course in the architecture of phones, tablets, wearables, and XR headsets — the systems that made specialization, energy, and heat the first-order design constraints of modern computing. You start at the instruction set and the system-on-chip block diagram, work through heterogeneous multicore CPUs, the memory hierarchy that decides most of your performance, and the fleet of accelerators that surrounds the CPU. Then the week that reframes everything: power, battery, and thermals — why a phone benchmarks brilliantly for ninety seconds and then does not. Integration, sensors, and radios follow; then hardware security from the root of trust up; then a final week on measuring honestly, comparing real silicon, and the systems coming next. Roughly sixty percent architecture, twenty-five percent hands-on measurement, fifteen percent emerging technology — and the capstone is an architecture investigation, not an app.