CS2013-final-report

CS/ECE 552: Introduction to Computer Architecture, University of
Wisconsin
Computer Sciences Department
sohi@cs.wisc.edu
http://pages.cs.wisc.edu/~karu/courses/cs552/spring2011/wiki/index.php/Main/Syllabus
Knowledge Areas that contain topics and learning outcomes covered in the course
Knowledge Area
Architecture and Organization (AR) 39
Total Hours of Coverage
Where does the course fit in your curriculum
This is taken by juniors, seniors, and beginning graduate students in computer science and computer engineering.
Prerequisites include courses that cover assembly language and logic design. This course is a (recommended)
prerequisite for a graduate course on advanced computer architecture. Approximately 60 students take the course
per offering; it is offered two times per year (once each semester).
What is covered in the course
The goal of the course is to teach the design and operation of a digital computer. It serves students in two ways.
First, for those who want to continue studying computer architecture, embedded systems, and other low-level
aspects of computer systems, it lays the foundation of detailed implementation experience needed to make the
quantitative tradeoffs in more advanced courses meaningful. Second, for those students interested in other areas of
computer science, it solidifies an intuition about why hardware is as it is and how software interacts with
hardware.
The subject matter covered in the course includes technology trends and their implications, performance
measurement, instruction sets, computer arithmetic, design and control of a datapath, pipelining, memory
hierarchies, input and output, and brief introduction to multiprocessors.
The full list of course topics is:
Introduction and Performance
• Technology trends
• Measuring CPU performance
• Amdahl’s law and averaging performance metrics
Instruction Sets
• Components of an instruction set
• Understanding instruction sets from an implementation perspective
• RISC and CISC and example instruction sets
Computer Arithmetic
• Ripple carry, carry lookahead, and other adder designs
• ALU and Shifters
• Floating-point arithmetic and floating-point hardware design
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