(2023/2024) Advanced Computer Architectures

The notes are taken from the books required for the course:

• J.L. Hennessy and D.A. Patterson. Computer Architecture: A Quantitative Approach. ISSN. Elsevier Science, 2017

You can view/download the PDF here. In the notes folder, you can also see the source code.

For any issue, use the appropriate section.

Course Syllabus

According to the official course syllabus:

• MIPS Processor Pipelining and Hazards; Multicycle Pipeline; Exceptions Handling;
• Static and Dynamic Branch Prediction;
• Memory Hierarchy: Basic and Advanced Concepts; Virtual Memory Architectures;
• Performance Evaluation and Metrics;
• Introduction to Instruction Level Parallelism: Static vs Dynamic Scheduling; Superscalars vs VLIW Processors;
• Scoreboard Dynamic Scheduling;
• Tomasulo Dynamic Scheduling;
• Register Renaming and Reorder Buffer;
• Static Scheduling: VLIW Architectures;
• Multithreading Architectures;
• Multiprocessors Architectures; Manycores;
• Cache Coherency Protocols in Multiprocessors;
• SIMD, Vector Processors; Intro to GP-GPUs; Intro to Tensor Cores.