a detailed specification of the computational, communication, and data storage elements (hardware) of a computer system, how those components interact (machine organisation), and how they are controlled (instruction set)
the manner in which numeric data and character data are represented internally in a particular operating environment. Architecture encompasses standards or conventions for storing floating-point numbers (IEEE or IBM 390); for character encoding (ASCII or EBCDIC); for the ordering of bytes in memory (big Endian or little Endian); for word alignment (4-byte boundaries or 8-byte boundaries); and for data-type length (16-bit, 32-bit, or 64-bit).
The basic framework or concepts (both hardware and software) around which a computer system is designed. Accordingly, the more forethought that goes into how a given computer system will be used, the more detailed its architecture can be specified.
The set of layers and protocols (including formats and standards that different hardware/software must comply with to achieve stated objectives) which define a computer system. Computer architecture features can be available to application programs and system programmers in several modes, including a protected mode. For example, the system-level features of computer architecture may include: (1) memory management, (2) protection, (3) multitasking, (4) input/output, (5) exceptions and multiprocessing, (6) initialization, (7) co-processing and multiprocessing, (8) debugging, and (9) cache management.
In computer engineering, computer architecture is the conceptual design and fundamental operational structure of a computer system. It is a blueprint and functional description of requirements (especially speeds and interconnections) and design implementations for the various parts of a computer — focusing largely on the way by which the central processing unit (CPU) performs internally and accesses addresses in memory.