Electrical Engineering or Computer Engineering?

You'd be better served by the CE degree. You're right EE is more broad but there is alot you can do with a CE degree as well and there's alot to it, that's why it was created as a separate major. It's all of those things you described. Actually, in your electives you can probably take a little bit of analog signal processing as well so you can do things like mixed signal circuits or sensor design. I don't think EE is too broad... it's still a well respected degree and you can end up doing any of the CE jobs with the proper electives and maybe some additional programming experience on the side......but the newer and more effective way to become a computer engineer in my opinion is to do the CE degree ......it just sounds like it would a better choice for you based on your interests. Also consider how much you like to program, because even though you're basically the hardware engineer with CE there is also quite a bit of programming and you can get jobs primarily programming, just more related to hardware and not so much higher-level stuff but some GUI, etc.

There's no question, given your list of goals. CE is the direction. CE will cover IC design issues (ASIC, design for manufacturability, VHDL, Verilog) and will involve cpu design, probably. This is all very close to operating systems and compilers. What you didn't mention and what tells me that EE is further from your goals, is that you didn't mention magnetics and Maxwell's equations (which you will get as an EE but will "gloss over, if at all" in CE.) If you want to learn switcher power supply design, transformer design, e-beam design (electron microscope optics) and get a solid grounding in magnetic fields then you want the EE side. (Don't worry -- you will still get all the math required because EE math equals CE math. So you will get gradients, curl, divergence, and vector fields.) But your list sounds a lot more like CE to me. You are wise to say "getting started" because neither EE nor CE provides enough time and teaching lectures for you to really get it all down. You need to "do stuff" on your own -- self-driven -- to really succeed. So you should get started RIGHT NOW and before you begin with a university. You have time and there are lots of very cheap tools and books you can get and start with, today. Don't wait. For example, you can buy a Texas Instruments LaunchPad microcontroller system for US$4.30, and that includes the shipping costs. You get two microcontrollers, a board, connectors so that you can add a daughter card of your own design to it, crystal, programming hardware to program the microcontrollers, software that will teach you assembly, C, and C++ (for free), and even have to do some soldering work to get the 32kHz crystal installed. The microcontrollers possess PWM capability, a fine-tunable DCO internal oscillator, and IO ports and switches and LEDs. Even the DCO can be very interesting and together with the crystal can teach you about PID and closed loop control for adjusting the CPU rate via phase-locked control (PLL.) It's incredible what you get and what you can do with only $4.30, these days. Don't wait. Start now. You will be on your own and self-educating anyway and might as well work on improving the habits.