EC6009 ADVANCED COMPUTER ARCHITECTURE SYLLABUS
OBJECTIVES:
The student should be made to:
Understand the micro-architectural design of processors.
Learn about the various techniques used to obtain performance improvement and power
savings in current processors.
UNIT I FUNDAMENTALS OF COMPUTER DESIGN
Review of Fundamentals of CPU, Memory and IO – Trends in technology, power, energy and cost,
Dependability - Performance Evaluation
UNIT II INSTRUCTION LEVEL PARALLELISM
ILP concepts – Pipelining overview - Compiler Techniques for Exposing ILP – Dynamic Branch Prediction –
Dynamic Scheduling – Multiple instruction Issue – Hardware Based Speculation – Static scheduling -
Multi-threading - Limitations of ILP – Case Studies.
UNIT III DATA-LEVEL PARALLELISM
Vector architecture – SIMD extensions – Graphics Processing units – Loop level parallelism.
UNIT IV THREAD LEVEL PARALLELISM
Symmetric and Distributed Shared Memory Architectures – Performance Issues –Synchronization –
Models of Memory Consistency – Case studies: Intel i7 Processor, SMT & CMP Processors
UNIT VMEMORY AND I/O
Cache Performance – Reducing Cache Miss Penalty and Miss Rate – Reducing Hit Time – Main Memory
and Performance – Memory Technology. Types of Storage Devices – Buses – RAID – Reliability,
Availability and Dependability – I/O Performance Measures.
TOTAL: 45 PERIODS
OUTCOMES:
At the end of the course, the student should be able to:
Evaluate performance of different architectures with respect to various parameters
Analyze performance of different ILP techniques
Identify cache and memory related issues in multi-processors
TEXT BOOK:
1. John L Hennessey and David A Patterson, “Computer Architecture A Quantitative Approach”, Morgan
Kaufmann/ Elsevier, Fifth Edition, 2012.
REFERENCES:
1. Kai Hwang and Faye Briggs, “Computer Architecture and Parallel Processing”, Mc Graw-Hill
International Edition, 2000.
2. Sima D, Fountain T and Kacsuk P, ”Advanced Computer Architectures: A Design Space Approach”,
Addison