Course Syllabus and Lecture Slides

Objective:   This course teaches students fundamental knowledge in computer architecture and microarchitecture. The course covers the basic organizations of computer systems including instruction-set architecture, execution pipeline, memory hierarchy, and I/O subsystem. It also addresses advanced processor microarchitecture issues such as dynamic instruction scheduling, branch prediction, lock-up free caches, instruction-level parallelism, multiple instruction fetch/issuing, speculative execution, etc. to improve computer processor performance. Shared-memory multiprocessor systems with coherent caches to reduce memory access latency are also covered. Finally, it outlines the verification issues of today's microprocessors.

Course Outline:   Tentative course outline is shown below.

1. Fundamentals of Computer Design
   • Lectures: introduction.ppt, fundamentals.ppt.
   • Reading: Chapter 1 of the textbook.
   • Lecture Index: Lecture 1 - 5.
2. Instruction Set Principles and Examples
   • Lectures: instruction.ppt.
   • Reading: Appendix B of the textbook, and MIPS Instruction Set.
   • Lecture Index: Lecture 6 - 8.
3. Pipelining: Basic and Intermediate Concepts
   • Lectures: pipelining.ppt.
   • Reading: Appendix A of the textbook.
   • Lecture Index: Lecture 9 - 14.
4. Instruction-Level Parallelism and Its Exploitation
   • Lectures: exploitation.ppt.
   • Reading: Chapter 2 of the textbook, and Itanium architecture (paper, slides).
   • Lecture Index: Lecture 14 - 19.
5. Limits on Instruction-Level Parallelism
   • Lectures: limits.ppt.
   • Reading: Chapter 3 of the textbook.
   • Lecture Index: Lecture 20 - 22.
6. MIDTERM:   October 28 (3:00 - 4:55 in CSE 107).
   Sample midterm is available here.
7. Review of Memory Hierarchy
   • Lectures: review.ppt.
   • Reading: Appendix C of the textbook.
   • Lecture Index: Lecture 23 - 27.
8. Multiprocessors and Thread-Level Parallelism
   • Lectures: multiprocessor.ppt.
   • Reading: Chapter 4 of the textbook.
   • Lecture Index: Lecture 28 - 32.
9. Memory Hierarchy Design
   • Lectures: memory.ppt.
   • Reading: Chapter 5 of the textbook.
   • Lecture Index: Lecture 32 - 36.
10. Storage Systems
    • Lectures: storage.ppt.
    • Reading: Chapter 6 of the textbook.
    • Lecture Index: Lecture 37 - 39.
11. Verification of Processor/Memory Architectures
    • Lectures: verification.ppt.
    • Reading: Specification-driven Validation of Programmable Embedded Systems (PDF).
12. Comprehensive FINAL:   December 16 (3:00 - 5:00 PM in CSE 107).

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