Computer Architecture, 5 cr

Core content

- Processor structure and instruction execution.
- Data path and data path control.
- Data path pipelining.
- Data dependencies, hazards, forwarding, delayed branching.
- Basic concepts and terms related to processor architecture.

- Memory hierarchy and caches. Locality.
- direct-mapped, set-associative and full-associative caches.

Complementary knowledge

- Speculation and prediction of program performance, branch prediction.
- VLIW and superscalar processor.
- Program/instructions disorder excecution, loop unrolling.
- Exceptions at datapath.
- Data dependencies: independence, output dependency.

- Cache control.
- Cache miss handling.
- Cache coherence.
- Cache performance.
- Reliability.

Specialist knowledge

- Data-level parallelism.
- Introduction to multiprocessor systems.
- Vector processor, GPU.

- Virtual memory.
- Address translation and translation-lookaside buffer.