Computer Science / Electrical Engineering 375:
Computer Architecture and Organization

Fall 2010

Current

• Extension for final project: eveyone may have, without asking, a 1-day extension to actual Dean's date. After that you need a Dean.
• Final Exam
  • Wed. Jan. 12, 1:30, Friend 006 NOTE ROOM CHANGE
  • Fine print on what you can bring to the exam: the textbook, your own notes and homeworks and midterm exam, and that's it. No other books or notes or materials not written by you. (No Google etc. of course.) No calculators, which you won't need anyway.

Syllabus

• Course description
• Administrative matters
• Requirements
  • Class participation
  • Mini problem sets
  • Examinations
  • Design project
• Reading
• Schedule

Past

• Announcements, etc.
  • Some have asked about the extra work a 3-person team needs to do for the project. It's this: in the final submission, implement a branch predictor (we'll give you the specs).
  • Feng Liu's office hours: M 11-12 and Th 4:30 - 5:30. Or send email for an appointment.
• Reading/writing assignments and discussion topics, by class number: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13, 14, 15, 16, 17, 18, 19, 20, 21, 22
• Enrichment links:
  • Might as well check out EDSAC on Wikipedia
  • Here's Maurice Wilkes' homepage
  • How to design an instruction set architecture, from 1947: Burks, Goldstine, and von Neumann's "Preliminary Discussion of the Logical Design of an Electronic Computing Instrument"
  • Floating point is for wimps, at least if you believe von Neumann: see section 5.3 of his paper.
  • For increased appreciation of "Bert time" and "Ernie time" in pipelines, just take a look at this. It's really cold.

  • And who invented caching? Who else? Here's the paper, from 1965.
  • Computer pioneer Sir Maurice Wilkes died at age 97.
  • In the last class we looked at register renaming and the active list in an imagined out-of-order MIPS processor. Here is what they really built.