What do Computer Engineering majors actually study?

[Cs342]

I was talking to a couple of my friends in college yesterday. One of them was a computer engineering major and one of them was in electrical engineering. Since those are both very technical fields, I thought I would talk to them about tech. To my surprise, neither of them new what Broadwell was, and only one of them had heard of SLI/Crossfire. They couldn't even name the current flagship CPU from intel, or the difference between DDR3 and DDR4. Neither of them had built a PC before. I was very surprised to discover this, because how can people build computer hardware if they don't even know about specs? Are there any CE/EE majors here who can clarify what is taught in college?

[Sauron]

Haha ^^ you got a wrong idea! Computer engineering does not refer to building computers; it refers to designing software. For the purposes of university you only need to very generally know what a cpu is, what you really care about is how it handles certain requests. As for the gpu, it's hardly ever even used during courses. This is because hardware is ever changing and if they taught people about specific components that knowledge would be useless in a year. Their objective is to teach how it generally works and build a thought infrastructure in the student that can accept new application-specific information if need be.

 

Electrical engineers design electronic parts, and by extensions cpus as well, but a cpu is so enormously complex that teaching how to build one to every single student wouldn't make sense; nobody designs a cpu alone (and not a lot of people actually get to design those in general).

 

Therefore knowing how a pc is built and what parts are around can be useful to both, but is not necessary for either degree.

[spenser_l]

I'm in a program focused on computer programming so I guess it's somewhat similar to a CE major.

 

Basically the reason they might not know about the latest consumer electronics is that it isn't directly relevant. It may be related, but they are likely learning about computers on a much lower level. Things like: how do the actual transistors work to make a computer run? What exactly is a CPU? How do the CPU and main memory communicate? These are the kinds of questions they're finding answers to, along with writing and designing software. Not: How many CUDA cores are in the latest Titan?

[Dredge]

I'm a computer Engineer in my Junior year. Majority of the field is coding, specifically object oriented programming. There's also a great deal of emphasis on logic design, microprocessing, circuits, and electronics. 

 

Computer Engineer almost identical, except Computer engineers take an extra year of classes. In fact I'll be getting 2 bachelors because in order to get a CS degree in addition to a CE degree I only need to take 4 extra classes. The extra classes that CE covers focus on hardware and operating system designs, and thus comes the term Software Engineersand Hardware Engineers.

 

Software Engineers are probably 70% of the field and focus on Operating system design...and that doesn't mean just Windows or OSX. That means remote controls, cars, head phones, and more. Operating systems are technically classified as any program that functions directly off of the input of the hardware. On your computer your OS is doing all the intermediary communicating between your keyboard strokes and the memory or the motherboard. In a remote control, you have to program your remote to function based on what TV you use. Even though you don't have a screen and you don't see what's going on, that key combination you enter to designate your TV brand is able to do so because of the operating system on that remote. That's a lame example, but it's the easiest to explain.

 

Hardware Engineers make up the rest of the field and they focus on hardware design. This is the actual architecture of the chips and circuits of the boards. This is why most jobs that call for a hardware engineer can also use an electrical engineer. Every time you hear about Intel reducing the die size down to X nanometers, that's do to hardware and electrical engineers developing a way to fit the same number of circuits into that much smaller of a space. Stack memory for SSD's? That was a hardware engineer who developed that.

 

So if a CE is just a combination of CS and Electrical Engineer why not just specify what you want to work on and get the shorter degree? Because of the intermediary knowledge of both fields, it usually allows us to design things in better practice. For example, when you look at the new Dx12 and how it talks of allowing the CPU to talk more directly with the GPU, thus allowing for higher dropscalls and such. The team that developed it was probably made up of a lot more CE's then previous versions, because they better understood how the hardware works, and how to maximize it. This doesn't mean a CE is a better programmer then a CS or a CE is better hardware designer then an EE, but we are the translators that make it easier for the 2 to understand each other.

[KE2012]

I'm in the 2nd year of Electronic and computer engineering at university, the computer side is half about programming, half about hardware, for example I have had to design a CPU (very basic multi-cycle) in a hardware language for one term, and in the other I did data structures, so how a computer handles data.

 

 

It does vary from universtity to universtity though as there is just so much a uni can cover, my brother did electronic engineering at a different uni and his course and module choices were completely different to my own. So what I tell you I did you might not even have the option for.