Focus of this course is on how the second two have contributed to recent performance improvements. Maximize performance while staying within cost constraints.
Former goal is difficult to determine.
Complex designs must provide higher performance to be competitive. Underestimating this is often the major reason an instruction set architecture must be abandoned. Compilers are relied upon to transform code to improve pipeline behavior and memory system behavior. Remember, bandwidth is proportional to cycle time and the width of the data path. The designer must take these improvements into account and design for a future technology.