CS 441: Modern Computer Architecture
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      TOPIC                                     APPROX. # of 75 min LECTURES 



Introduction  ................................................ 3

   - Performance measurement and benchmarking
   - Cost estimation
   - Amdahl's Law and applications
   - Compiler technology and computer architecture
   - DLX - the quintessential RISC machine


Basic Instruction Pipelines ................................... 3

   - The DLX instruction pipeline
   - Structural Hazards
   - Data Hazards
   - Control Hazards
   - Exception handling in DLX
   - Hazards and forwarding in longer latency pipes


Advanced Pipelining  ........................................... 4

   - Instruction level parallelism
   - Dynamic Scheduling (CDC 6600 scoreboard 
                         and Tomasulo's algorithm)
   - Techniques for branch penalty reduction
   - A superscalar DLX
   - Compiler support for extracting ILP
   - Case Study: PowerPC 620


Topics in Memory and I/O ....................................... 4

   - Review of cache memory
   - Minimization of hit time, miss rate and miss penalty
   - Examples of virtual memory
   - I/O devices and performance
   - The RAID architecture


Introduction to networking ..................................... 6

   - Connecting multiple processors using hypercubes or
                multistage interconnection networks
   - Batcher sorting networks
   - Circuit, packet and wormhole routing
   - Intro to Local area networks: topologies, media and protocols
   - TCP/IP and ATM protocol suites
   - Case studies

 
Parallel processing and multiprocesor design ................... 7

   - Taxonomy of parallel machines
   - Characteristics of application domains
   - Shared memory versus message passing architectures
   - The multiprocessor cache coherence problem
   - Multiprocessor synchronization
   - Multiprocessor performance issues


The 80x86 and 64-bit processors of the future .................. 2