Course Schedule and Catalog

Long Title: COMPUTER SYSTEMS ARCHITECTURE

Department: Electrical & Computer Eng.

Grade Mode: Standard Letter

Course Type: Lecture/Laboratory

Credit Hours: 4

Prerequisite(s): ELEC 326 OR COMP 326

Description: Evolution of key architecture concepts found in advanced uniprocessor systems. Fundamental and advanced pipelining techniques and associated issues for improving processor performance. Illustrated with RISC processors such as the ARM processor. Examine several metrics for processor performance, such as Amdahl’s law. Key concepts of data and program memory systems found in modern systems with memory hierarchies and cashes. Perform experiments in cache performance analysis. Influence of technology trends, such as Moore’s law, on processor implementation Approaches for exploiting instruction level parallelism, such as VLIW. Introduction to parallel and multicore architectures. Introduction to processor architectures targeted for imbedded applications. Cross-list: COMP 425.