This isn’t the forum to be asking ultra-novice questions, or I apologize but overall “stupid” questions like that, but I’ll give it a go to answer you. Hoping that understanding the “why” will fuel your compassion to learn what appears to be an unnecessary class and hopefully to one day prevent you from boning over your company’s sysAdmin ultra hard.
Plain an simple “You need to know hardware to not program crap software” and I don’t mean you need to know what GPU is recommended by Tom’s Hardware, or that your machine has 8GB of ram and a sweet SSD.
You need to know endianess(https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Endianness) to program efficiently. You need to know core counts to run a self-managing, self-scaling nodejs clustered server, and what chip onboard codecs run best for a given configuration. You need to know that also to create a valid virtualbox machine or VMWare machine. You need to know the lowest possible denominator so that you know how your RAID Array is going to perform.
You need to know how many read/writes SSD’s can manage before breaking down so you don’t botch a company’s entire data repository cause “You thought Samsung SSD’s were good!”
You need to know about platter space so you can keep things running nicely, and trimming so your SSD on that old “Vista” machine they won’t get rid of doesn’t fill up with non trimmed data.
You need to go into Bob Joe Company, who’s using WindowsXP and tell them where they can utilize their spend dollars the most efficient and safe way.
You need to know input/output, you need to understand the differences between VRAM and physical RAM, clock speeds, overclocking, latency, cycles, Hyper Threading, onboard/discrete hardware. You need to know why many things once existed to know why they are done the way they are today.
For example, when you have a horrendous update on your physical machine that blows everything up, you need to know that in a FUBAR situation you can jump CMOS and start over (that’s a physical HARDWARE button that many lvl II’s and III’s often don’t even have a clue about, guess where I learned it before ever being in IT? ” Intro to computers – Hardware “)
“Unlearn” while you’re in school and you’ll find there’s much you did not “learn” as you thought you did the first time around.
solved Use of learning computer system architecture? [closed]