Course objectives: The purpose of this course is to provide a solid foundation in architecture of general purpose computers. This course builds background to further study and research in architecture of modern computer systems. The course gives concrete idea of different approaches to designing a single CPU. The course introduces instruction level parallelism, branch prediction techniques, various cache organization, multithreaded architectures, cache coherency and their impact on parallel processing.

Prerequisites: Computer Organization and Systems Programming.

Level of the Course: The course is designed for first year graduate students or advanced undergraduate students.

Text Book: Computer Architecture: A Quantitative Approach by J. Hennessy and D. Patterson, Morgan Kaufmann Publishing Co., 3rd Edition (or 4th edition).

Reference Book:
Computer Organization and Design: The Hardware/Software Interface by J. Hennessy and D. Patterson, Morgan Kaufmann Publishing Co.
Modern Processor Design by J. P. Shen and M. H. Lipasti, McGraw Hill.
Parallel Computer Architecture by D. E. Culler and J. P. Singh, Morgan Kaufman Publishing Co.

Selected Topics: CPU design, instruction sets, control, processors, busses, ALU, memory, memory hierarchies, pipelined computers, multiprocessors, benchmarks to reveal and compare the performance of alternative design choices in system design, and network-oriented interconnections