CS 3760

CS3760 A-- Computer Organization

Winter 1999

Professor: Richard Fujimoto, Room 319 CoC Building, fujimoto@cc.gatech.edu ,4-5615, Office Hours :TuTh 2:00-3:30 or by appointment; best way to contact is via e-mail.
Teaching Assistants: Yuan Chen, Room 104A CoC (Database Lab), yuanchen@cc.gatech.edu Office Hours : MW 2:30-3:30pm (COC 104A)
Textbook: Computer Organization & Design, The Hardware/Software Interface, Second Edition, Patterson and Hennessy, Morgan Kaufmann Publishers
.Newsgroup: Please read git.cc.class.3760 regularly for important announcements and discussions.

Prerequisites: You should have had a course in digital logic design(e.g., EE 1300 or EE 1700) and machine instruction sets(e.g. ,CS2760). Specifically, you should be familiar with the following topics before taking this cour ses: Boolean algebra, sequential circuits (state machine design), hardware components(specially gates, registers, random access memory, read-only memory) number representations(e.g., two's complement), machine instruction sets, and encoding of machine instructions. You should review the material in Appendix B(hardware design) and Chapter 3 ( machine instructions sets) to refresh your memory on these subjects.

Course Objectives: The focus of this course is on the hardware design of a computer system, specifically the CPU, memory system, and I/O devices. After completing this course, you should be able to come up with a register-transfer level hardware design for a CPU given its instruction set.

Homework and Exams: There will be two in-class quizzes, a final, and homework assignments of varying levels of difficulty. In computing your final grade, the quizzes and final will be weighted 60%( each will given equal weight), and the homework 40%. Graduating seniors will take an early final during the last week of the quarter. The early final will likely be an oral exam. You will be allowed a total of three late days throughout the quarter for late homework to allow for illness, out-of-town travel, etc. Beyond those three days, no late work will be accepted. Finally, in accordance with institute rules, and incomplete for course can only be issued if a limited portion of the course(e.g., an exam) needs to be made up, the students is otherwise passing the course except for the incomplete work, and the reason for missing the work is for non-academic reasons, e.g., workload in other courses does not constitute a valid reason for receiving an incomplete.

Week	Topic	Reading	Special Dates
1	Hardware fundamentals	Appendix B
2	H/W fund.(cont.), data path design	Chapter 5	HW1 due (Thursday 1/14/99)
3	Data path design
4	Control units		Quiz 1(Thursday 1/28/99)
5	Performance	Chapter 2
6	Pipelines	Chapter 6
7	Pipelines(cont.), memory hierarchy	Chapter 7	Quiz 2(Thursday, 2/18/99)
8	Memory hierarchy(cont.),I/O	Chapter 8
9	I/O(cont.) multiprocessors	Chapter 9
10	Computer arithmetic	Chapter 4