Covers the broad range of concepts, techniques and structures useful in designing general purpose digital computers and stresses the analysis of cost and performance. Topics: Detailed computer design, instruction set design, processor implementation, pipelining, cache design, memory hierarchy, and input/output. Types of computers to be studied include supercomputers, mainframes, workstations, and personal computers. Refer to the course web site ece.colorado.edu/~ecen5593/syllabus.html for more information. Same as ECEN 5593.

Machine-level programming Instruction set design Pipeline processor implementation Memory subsystem Simultaneous multithreading/hyperthreading Speculative multithreading Compiler/program optimization I/O and storage subsystem Parallel computing

Understand advanced computer processors, caches, and memory. Analyze performance trade-offs in computer design.

Explore advanced concepts and state-of-the-art developments in computer architecture: memory systems, pipelining, simultaneous multithreading, run-time optimization, array processing, parallel processing, multiprocessing, abstract analytic models, power-aware computing, embedded computing, relationship between computer design and application

ECEN 4593 (Computer Organization) or an equivalent first course in computer design. Students should already understand some computer instruction set and know how to design a control unit, arithmetic unit, memory, and input/output interface to implement a computer with that instruction set.

Henessy and Patterson, Computer Architecture: A Quantitative Approach, 3rd ed., Morgan Kaufmann Publishers, 2002, ISBN 1-55860-596-7.

Web and e-mail access required.