EE547A: Computer Architecture I
 
Instructor Course Description Textbooks Assessment Schedule and Notes Labs
 

     
Instructor:
  Dr. Costas Kyriacou  
  Office: Research Center - Room 111
  Phone: +357-22345159 ext. 111
  e-mail: eng.kc@fit.ac.cy
  Home Page: http://staff.fit.ac.cy/eng.kc/
  Office Hours: Thursday 16:00 - 17:00

Course Description:
  1. Issues raised and tradeoffs in modern high performance processor and computer designs. Latency tolerance and technology trends and limitations
  2. Instruction Level Parallelism: Complex Pipelines, superscalar, superpilelined, VLIW/EPIC and Vector microarchitectures and OOO execution. Branch prediction and Speculative execution.
  3. Thread Level Parallelism: Latency and latency tolerance. Multithreading, implicit/explicit multithreading, blocking/non-blocking multithreading, and thread switching mechanisms. Simultaneous multithreading, hyperthreading, Subordinate Multithreading SSMT/Helper threads.
  4. Technology Issues: Clock frequency trends, transistor density trends, power scaling and temperature issues, wire scaling, wire fan out and soft errors.

TextBooks:
  • J. Hennessy and D. Patterson, “Computer Architecture A Quantitative Approach ”, Morgan Kaufman Publishers Inc., 2008

Assessment:
   
 
  • Midterm Exam: 20%
 
  • Literature Review Assignment: 20%
 
  • Paper Assignment: 20%
 
  • Final Exam: 40%

Schedule and Notes:
   
 
  1. Thursday: 17:00 - 20:40 (Main Building - Room 12)

 

Week Date Topic Notes  
1
08/07/2010
 Introduction - Course Outline Lec1_Introduction_and Outline  
2
22/07/2010
 Computer Architecture Trends in the 90s (Latency Tolerance) Lec2_Latency Tolerance  
3
29/07/2010

Complex ILP Architectures - Superscalar Processors:

 Lec3_Complex Pipelines  
4
05/08/2010
5
26/08/2010
 Out-Of-Order Execution Lec4_OutOfOrder Execution  
6
02/09/2010
 Branch Prediction - Speculative Execution Lec5_Branch Prdiction Literature Review
7
06/09/2010
 Tutorials Tutorial  
8
09/09/2010
 Multithreaded Architectures Lec6_Multithreading Assignment
9
13/09/2010
 VLIW Architecures Lec7_VLIW  
10
16/09/2010
 Computer Architecture Trends in the 2000s (Chip Multiprocessors)   Revisiont
11
23/09/2010
 Final Exams