Course Description
This is a graduate-level course on how the computer works. In this
course, we will review fundamental structures in modern microprocessor
and computer system architecture design. We will cover computer
organization, instruction set design, memory system design, pipelining,
cache coherence protocols, memory schedulers, power/energy, prefetching
and other techniques to explore instruction level parallelism and
thread level parallelism. We will also cover system level topics such as
storage subsystems. We will also have case studies as to how modern
microprocessors are designed.
Text book:
No required text book.
Recommended books
Computer Architecture: A Quantitative Approach, 5th Edition by John Hennessy and David Patterson (H&P).
Microprocessor architecture, Jean-Loup Baer, Cambridge.
Papers (see Reading )