Advanced Computer Architecture

Catalog description

This course explores the design and evaluation of modern uniprocessor computing systems. Students will be introduced to developments in Evaluation methodology, metrics and caveats, instruction set design, advanced pipelining, instruction level parallelism, prediction-based techniques, alternative architectures (VLIW, Vector and SIMD), memory hierarchy design, I/O, and recent trends in architecture (e.g., low-power architectures, application-specific processors). Several case studies examine the application of these architectural ideas in modern commercial processors.