This is a course on computer design, outlining the evolution and trends and looking into the future possible enhancements in performance of future machines. The course covers topics such as defining computer architecture, trends in computer architecture technology, trends in power in integrated circuits, trends in cost and dependability, measuring, reporting and summarizing performance, quantitative principles of computer design, performance, price vs. performance, fallacies and pitfalls. Other topics to be covered include instruction-level parallelism, limits of instruction-level parallelism, multiprocessors and thread-level parallelism, memory hierarchy design and storage systems.
Prerequisites
CS 280 or its equivalent or CS 502 or its equivalent