Policies
Notes
Homework
Project
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Update (11/25): Since several students are working on the ISCA deadline, the final project report deadline has been postponed to Sunday, Dec 4th, 11:59pm.
Update (11/21): Week 15 readings posted. Final presentation slot sign-up will occur in class on 11/22. First-come, first serve. If you don't show up, you'll get whatever is left over.
Update (11/17): Week 14 readings posted.
General Description: This post-CS4290/6290 course focuses on advanced
microarchitecture-level studies of modern and future high-performance
microprocessors. We will cover low-level implementation details, design
concepts, engineering decisions, power/performance/complexity/reliability
tradeoffs, and other aspects of creating processors.
We will include several case-studies using real processor designs such as
the Intel Pentium-Pro (P6), Intel NetBurst (P4), the Compaq/DEC Alpha 21264,
IBM Power 4, AMD Opteron, Sony Cell, etc. The course format will consist of normal
lectures, homeworks, two exams, a project component (with presentations), and a final exam.
Course Prereqs: CS4290/CS6290, equivalent "Hennessy and
Patterson:A Quantitative Approach" course, or permission of the
instructor. Note that a CS2200-type course, which uses "Patterson and
Hennessy:The HW/SW Interface", is not considered to be sufficient. If you
have any questions, email the instructor.
Textbook: "Modern Processor Design: Fundamentals of Superscalar
Processors" John Paul Shen and Mikko Lipasti, McGraw Hill, 2005, 1st
edition. (Not the Beta Edition.)
Supplemental reading in the form of papers, articles, etc. will be
provided on the notes page.
Office Hours
Immediately after class in my office (CCB221), from 6:00-7:00. If class
ends early, then there will be longer office hours (until 7:00).
Course Policies
Collaboration, Cheating, Late Homework, etc.
Tentative Schedule:
| Date | Week/Day | Topics | Other Notes |
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| Aug 23 | 1/Tue | Performance Metrics (again) | |
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| Aug 25 | 1/Thu | Other Metrics: power, complexity, $$$ | |
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| Aug 30 | 2/Tue | Review of Pipelining | |
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| Sep 1 | 2/Thu | Review of Superscalar/OOO Processors | |
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| Sep 6 | 3/Tue | Superscalar Fetch | |
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| Sep 8 | 3/Thu | Branch Prediction | |
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| Sep 13 | 4/Tue | Advanced Fetch | |
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| Sep 15 | 4/Thu | Superscalar Decode, Other Pipelining Issues | |
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| Sep 20 | 5/Tue | Register Renaming | |
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| Sep 22 | 5/Thu | Data-Capture Schedulers | |
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| Sep 27 | 6/Tue | Speculative Schedulers | |
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| Sep 29 | 6/Thu | Finish Off Scheduling | |
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| Oct 4 | 7/Tue | ALU and Bypass Organization | |
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| Oct 6 | 7/Thu | Memory Scheduling | |
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| Oct 11 | 8/Tue | Cache Hierarchy | |
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| Oct 13 | 8/Thu | Commit, Exceptions, Interrupts | |
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| Oct 18 | 9/Tue | FALL RECESS | |
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| Oct 20 | 9/Thu | Hardware Prefetching | Project Proposal Due |
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| Oct 25 | 10/Tue | Multi-this, Multi-that | |
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| Oct 27 | 10/Thu | Midterm Exam | Solutions |
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| Nov 1 | 11/Tue | Intel P6 | |
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| Nov 3 | 11/Thu | Alpha 21264 | |
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| Nov 8 | 12/Tue | Intel Pentium 4 | Project Status Report Due |
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| Nov 10 | 12/Thu | AMD K7 and K8 | |
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| Nov 15 | 13/Tue | Intel Pentium M | |
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| Nov 17 | 13/Thu | Intel Monticeto (Itanium) | |
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| Nov 22 | 14/Tue | IBM Power 4/5 | |
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| Nov 24 | 14/Thu | THANKSGIVING | |
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| Nov 29 | 15/Tue | Sun UltraSparc and Niagara | |
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| Dec 1 | 15/Thu | Sony Cell | Project Final Report Due |
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| Dec 6 | 16/Tue | Project Presentations | |
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| Dec 8 | 16/Thu | Project Presentations | |
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| Color Decoder |
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General Topics
| Background and Review |
| In-order Processing |
| Out-of-order Processing |
| Memory-related |
| Multi-threading |
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Case Studies
| Intel |
| IBM |
| Dec/Compaq/HP/Alpha |
| AMD |
| Sun |
| Sony |
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Other
| Exams |
| Breaks |
| Student Presentations |
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