SoC & Application Processors
Curated: step up from the basics to how a real System-on-Chip and its application processor (ARM Cortex-A class) actually work — what a SoC integrates, MCU vs MPU, the cache/memory hierarchy, pipelining, virtual memory and the MMU, and on-chip buses (AMBA/AXI) — from a top-rated free Princeton course, then go deeper on a real SoC and get certified. An intermediate module of the computer-architecture track.
Computer Architecture
Princeton University (David Wentzlaff) · video · ~25h · Free · English
Why we picked it: The classic, most-recommended free intermediate computer-architecture course — the world's first Computer Architecture MOOC — taught by Prof. David Wentzlaff of Princeton. It's rated 4.7 stars from ~3,875 reviews on Coursera and, unusually, all features are available for free (audit) with no paywalled videos or assignments. It builds from the ISA/microarchitecture contract up through pipelining, the cache/memory hierarchy, virtual memory, and superscalar/out-of-order execution to multicore and on-chip interconnects — exactly the layer that turns a plain CPU into a real application processor inside a System-on-Chip.
- ISA vs. microarchitecture — the hardware/software contract
- pipelining a processor and pipeline hazards
- caches and the memory hierarchy (multilevel caches, prefetching, hit/miss)
- virtual memory: paging, TLBs and memory protection (the MMU's job)
- superscalar and out-of-order execution (instruction-level parallelism)
- multithreading and multicore processors
- cache coherence and on-chip interconnects/buses
- how these ideas compose into a modern application processor
Study guide
Open the study guide →1 study section · what to focus on + prove it in Forge, then take the check.