Advanced Computer Architectures

COURSE OBJECTIVES

Learn about the major architectural ideas that have made the incredible growth rate of modern microprocessors possible.

COURSE DESCRIPTION

The course builds on basic previous knowledge in basic computer architecture, and visits the major techniques that have been devised so far in order to get high performance from a single processor, and, later on, from multi-processors. After the course you will understand the concepts of pipelined CPUs, cache architecture and optimization, Instruction-Level parallelism (Superscalar and VLIW architectures), Thread-Level parallelism (fine-grained, coarse-grained, simultaneous multithreading), Data-level parallelism (Vector architectures), and shared-memory multi-processing.

LEARNING METHODS

Lectures, Assignments, Exams

EXAMINATION INFORMATION
Midterm written exam, and Final written exam. Assignments will also be given.

REFERENCES

• J. Hennessey, D. Patterson: Computer Architecture: a quantitative approach. Morgan-Kaufmann Publishers.