CS2013-final-report

Datapath and Control
• Single-cycle and multi-cycle datapaths
• Control of datapaths and implementing control finite-state machines
Pipelining
• Basic pipelined datapath and control
• Data dependences, data hazards, bypassing, code scheduling
• Branch hazards, delayed branches, branch prediction
Memory Hierarchies
• Caches (direct mapped, fully associative, set associative)
• Main memories
• Memory hierarchy performance metrics and their use
• Virtual memory, address translation, TLBs
Input and Output
• Common I/O device types and characteristics
• Memory mapped I/O, DMA, program-controlled I/O, polling, interrupts
• Networks
Multiprocessors
• Introduction to multiprocessors
• Cache coherence problem
What is the format of the course
The course is 15 weeks long, with students meeting for three 50-minute lectures per week or two 75-minute
lectures per week. If the latter, the course is typically “front loaded” so that lecture material is covered earlier in
the semester and students are able to spend more time later in the semester working on their projects.
How are students assessed
Assessment is a combination of homework, class project, and exams. There are typically six homework
assignments. The project is a detailed implementation of a 16-bit computer for an example instruction set. The
project requires both an unpipelined as well as a pipelined implementation and typically takes close to a hundred
hours of work to complete successfully. The project and homeworks are typically done by teams of 2 students.
There is a midterm exam and a final exam, each of which is typically 2 hours long.
Course textbooks and materials
David A. Patterson and John L. Hennessy, Computer Organization and Design: The Hardware and Software
Interface Morgan Kaufmann Publishers,
Fourth Edition. ISBN: 978-0-12-374493-7
Why do you teach the course this way
Since the objective is to teach how a digital computer is designed and built and how it executes programs, we want
to show how basic logic gates could be combined to construct building blocks which are then combined to work
together to execute programs written in a machine language. The students learn the concepts of how to do so in
the classroom, and then apply them in their project. Having taken this course a student can go into an industrial
environment and be ready to participate in the design of complex digital.
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