Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering

ECE 532 Optimization Aspects of Computer Architecture

Superscalar pipeline, instruction level parallelism, out-of-order execution, register renaming, instruction/data prefetching, control speculation, data speculation, load forwarding, load bypassing, VLIW.

Credit Hours: 3 Lecture

Prerequisites: ECE 429

Course Coordinator: Computer Engineering Group

Textbooks:

1. "Modern Processor Design: Fundamentals of Superscalar Processors, First Edition", John P. Shen, McGraw Hill, 2005, MHID: 0-07-057064-7.

References:

1. Computer Architecture: A Quantitative Approach, Third Edition by John L. Hennessy and David A. Patterson .

Goals:

1. Introduction to the fundamental principles of microarchitectural and architectural optimization techniques for microprocessors.

2. To familiarize the students with the design skills and trade-off issues to achieve high performance.

3. To familiarize the students with the state-of-the-art superscalar simulator.

Projects:

1. Data cache performance analysis.

2. Simulate the Alpha 21264 microprocessor.

3. Dead time analysis for non-activate cache lines.

4. A research project to explore an aspect of the current or future architecture in depth.

Computer Tools: Simplescalar, Dinera

Last Review: Spring Semester 2004