CS 250: Computer Architecture

Prerequisites:

CS 18200 (Foundations of Computer Science)

CS 24000 (Programming in C)

Detailed Syllabus:

1. Digital Logic:

   • fundamentals of digital logic;
   • using a breadboard to create a digital circuit;
   • using logic gates to build and test combinatorial circuits;
   • wiring and testing a circuit that uses a clock to control a sequence of operations.
   • Data paths and a fetch-execute cycle.

2. Processors:

   • operand addressing and instruction representation;
   • RISC and CISC machines;
   • CPUs;
   • programming a RISC computer in assembly language;
   • converting among one's complement, two's complement, signed, and sign-magnitude representations;
   • writing code to test whether the underlying hardware uses one’s or two’s complement arithmetic;
   • writing code to test whether the underlying hardware uses big-endian or little-endian byte order;
   • writing a function in assembly language that is called from C;
   • calling a C function from an assembly language program;
   • rearranging instructions to avoid pipeline stalls.

3. Memory:

   • physical and virtual memories;
   • access paradigm;
   • physical and virtual addressing;
   • caches and caching;
   • comparing programs that access an array in row-major and column-major order;
   • stepping through the mapping from virtual address to physical address;
   • calculating the memory bank into which a given memory location maps when using N-way interleaving.

4. Input/Output:

   • buses and bus address spaces;
   • programmed and interrupt-driven I/O;
   • multiplexing;
   • a programmer’s view of I/O;
   • buffering;
   • basic role of a device driver.

5. Design Considerations:

   • parallelism and parallel architectures;
   • data pipelining;
   • pipeline stalls and flush times;
   • performance of a data pipeline;
   • power and energy;
   • hardware modularity and module reuse