CE202

Computer Architecture

Richard's Office Hours (AS315A): M 10-11, W 10-11

Ahmed Amer (amer4@cats) is our part-time TA. He will have an office hour on Tuesdays (11:00 AM, AS350).

Read the newsgroup ucsc.class.cmpe202. Administrative questions (or pointers to questions posted to the newsgroup) can be mailed to me (rph@cse.ucsc.edu).

If you liked this class, you may be interested in a job at intel.

12/11/98


Comments: Ahmed promises to put graded homework 4s in your mailboxes by 8PM this evening.

12/9/98

Topics: Projects
Comments: The FINAL will be on Monday, December 14, 12:00-3:00, Applied Sciences 372. Open book, notes, and calculator. Office hour Friday, 3-4. Some or all homework should be available for pickup during office hours.

12/7/98

Topics: FP
Comments: Problems 5.1, 5.14, 5.15, 5.19, 6.12 through 6.15 look like reasonable raid problems. Similarly, 8.1,8.3-8.6, and 8.9 all look interesting. The primary topics we have covered include performance analysis, instruction sets and CPIs, pipelining, hazards and forwarding, superscalar architecture and other tricks, several current architectures, memory system design including cache, TLB, and virtual memory organizations, and brief discussions of parallel processing, disks, floating point, and class projects.

12/4/98

Topics: Disks
Comments: More RAID notes are available.

12/2/98

Topics: Disks
Comments: Floating point notes are available. Project progress report is due Friday.

11/30/98

Topics: SIMD, Kestrel, Memory performance assignment.
Comments: Notes for Chapter 6 are available.

11/25/98

Topics: SIMD
Comments: Here's a link Aman Shaikh found to DEC's Tech Report site that includes information on how to create your own ATOM program annotator plugin.
Progress: The averages so far have the same progress milestones as the midterm (90 is 2 Dilbert stickers, 80 is 1 sticker, 70 is satisfactory, 60 needs some work, and 50 needs a lot of work.)

11/23/98

Topics: Snoopy and directory caching.
Handouts: Comments on Problem set 2, to be handed back next time.

11/20/98 3:45-4:55

Topics: Parallelism, shared memory.
Handouts: A parallelism overview is available in the filing cabinet.
Homework: Problem set 4 is due on November 30.

11/18/98

Topics: Alpha memory, shared memory.
Handouts: Chapter 8 (preliminary) is available. I have also replaced the PicoJava article from IEEE Computer.

11/16/98

Topics: Cache, memory.
Handouts:
Comments: Problem set 3 has been revised as mentioned in class.

11/16/98

Topics: Cache, memory.
Handouts:

11/13/98

Topics: Cache
Handouts: The rest of ch 5 is in the filing cabinet.

11/11/98

Topics: Midterm, cache.
Handouts: New handouts (including updated version of the initial chapter 5 pages) are in the filing cabinet.

11/9/98

Topics: Memory
Handouts: A preliminary version is available in the filing cabinet.

11/6/98

Topics: Midterm
Homework: Problem set 3 is due on November 20.

11/4/98

Topics: PowerPC 750, R10000, Memory Hierarchy
Homework: Project proposals are due today and the midterm is Friday. Since you'll be having some homework on scoreboarding and/or Tomosulo, don't expect any detailed problems on them, though you may wish to review the high-level features.
Comments: The `atom' program on the Compaq Alpha's may be useful for generating real instruction and memory traces.

11/2/98

Topics: Dynamic branch prediction, superscalar issues.
Handouts: Handouts on R10000, PowerPC750, and PicoJava are available. You can find more links at the CPU Information Center.

10/30/98

Topics: The pipelining homwork problem.
Handouts: Comments on homework 1

10/28/98

Topics: Dynamic instruction scheduling

10/26/98

Topics: ILP
Handouts: The rest of chapter 4 is available.
Comment: README.ucsc discusses how to run dlxcc and dlxsim.

10/23/98

Topics: R4000, ILP
Handouts: Start of chapter 4 is available.

10/21/98

Topics: Control hazards
Homework: Problem set 2 is due on at the start of class on October 28.
Comments: The end of chapter 3 is available.

10/19/98

Topics: Pipeline hazards
Comments: Marlon Chen has set up his own CE202 project page.

10/16/98

Handouts: Project ideas.
Topics: Basic pipeline implementation, when to latch PC.

10/14/98

Handouts: More of chapter 3 is available.
Homework: Here's why eqntott was removed from Spec.
Topics: Instruction set implementation.

10/12/98

Handouts: Initial chapter 3 notes available.
Homework: Due Wednesday!
Topics: Instruction sets: DLX and other RISC machines. Effects of languages on architecture. Difficulty of comparing performance numbers. Effects of instrcuction choices on instruction encoding.
Comments: Monday office hour moved to 10AM (or send email).

10/7/98

Handouts: Chapter 2 notes are available -- please keep them neat!
Topics: Instruction sets.
Homework: Problem set 1 is due on October 14 at the start of class.
Comments:

10/5/98

Topics: Performance measurements, instruction set philosophy.
Homework: (informal) Check out the SPEC rating of the computer you're using.
Comments: Here are two old synthetic benchmarks, dhrystone.c and whetstone.c. By comparison, the CPU Information Center (which has a good set of links to die photos as well) and the Standard Performance Evaluation Corporation (SPEC) have more recent performance data.

10/2/98

Handouts: Syllabus, quiz, survey, typing injuries
Class notes are in the 2-drawer filing cabinet by the second-floor stairwell in the rear of applied sciences.
Topics: Introduction, RSI, computer history, the computer as a car.