Sure you need the general sense for architecture which comes from experience, but it is not a long list. Learning about computer hardware and assembly from scratch is what made it all come together for me. Algorithmic complexity, data structures, development tools were all a mystery and "just things to memorize" until I learned about logic gates, developed transistors from those logic gates to get memory circuits, developed binary full adders, a bus, a basic cpu with a few registers and a program pointer and actually programmed it with its own instruction set. All you really need for this is pen and paper. Then move on to multicore, multiprocess, scheduling, then move to simd and graphics hardware. If you have several months to dedicate, I'd say go for that.