Computer Organization and Architecture

• Fundamentals:
  • Computer Architecture and Technology Trends,
  • Moore's Law,
  • Classes of Parallelism and Parallel Architectures,
  • Instruction Set Architecture:
    • The Myopic View of Computer Architecture,
    • Trends in Technology,
    • Trends in Cost,
  • Processor Speed, Cost, Power, Power Consumption, Fabrication Yield
  • Performance Metrics and Evaluation:
    • Measuring Performance,
    • Benchmark Standards,
    • Iron Law of Performance,
    • Amdahl's Law,
    • Lhadma's Law
• Memory Hierarchy Design:
  • Basics of Memory Hierarchy,
  • Coherence and locality properties,
  • Cache memory organizations,
  • Cache Performance,
  • Cache optimization techniques,
  • Virtual Memory,
  • Techniques for Fast Address Translation
• Pipelining:
  • What is pipelining,
  • Basics of a RISC ISA,
  • The classic five-stage pipeline for a RISC processor,
  • Performance issues in pipelining,
  • Pipeline Hazards
• Branches and Prediction:
  • Branch Prediction,
  • Direction Predictor,
  • Hierarchical Predictors,
  • If Conversion,
  • Conditional Move
  • Instruction Level Parallelism:
    • Introduction,
    • RAW and WAW,
    • dependencies,
    • Duplicating Register Values,
    • ILP
• Multiprocessor architecture:
  • taxonomy of parallel architectures.
  • Centralized shared-memory,
  • Distributed shared-memory architecture,
  • Message passing vs Shared Memory