55:132/22C:160 Spring 2011
Syllabus
Text:
John Hennessy and David Patterson, Computer Architecture, A
Quantitative Approach, Fourth Edition, Morgan Kaufmann, 2007
(Note: Make sure you purchase the Fourth Edition, not one of the older
editions)
Supplemental References:
John Paul Shen and Mikko
H. Lipasti, Modern Processor Design--Fundamentals
of Superscalar Processors, McGraw Hill,
2005.
Donald E. Thomas and Philip R. Moorby, The Verilog Hardware Description Language, Fifth Edition, Springer Verlag ,
2008.
References for a given subject are in braces [], and approximate
number of lectures spent on the subject are shown in parenthesis ().
- Introduction (3) [Text Chapter 1, Appendix B]
- Technology trends
- Instruction set
architecture
- Quantitative assessment
of performance
- Instruction-level
parallelism and Amdahls Law
- Verilog Tutorial (2) [Thomas/Moorby]
- Pipelines and Pipelined Design Techniques (5) [Text
Appendix A]
- Basic principles
- Pipelined processor
design
- Examples
- Instruction Level Parallelism and Superscalar
Architecture (7) [Text Chapters2, 3]
- Basic ILP concepts
- Compiler versus
hardware scheduling
- Branch Prediction and
speculative execution
- Limits on ILP
- Case studies
- Multiprocessors and Multi-core Processors (4) [Text
Chapter 4]
- Shared memory
multiprocessors
- Synchronization and
memory consistency
- Case studies
- Memory System Design (5) [Text Appendix C, Chapter 5]
- Performance
characteristics
- Cache design
- Virtual memory
- Examples
- Case studies (2) [ Lecture Notes]
Last update: Jan 7, 2011 by JGK