Computer System Design: Advanced Concepts of Modern Microprocessors

Week 1: Instruction and thread-level parallelism and models for parallel and out-of-order execution (1 hour)

• Multicore systems: It is all about parallelism. Fundamentals.
• Microarchitecture fundamentals.
• Memory systems fundamentals.
• Performance fundamentals.
• Energy fundamentals.
• Putting it together.

Week 2: Speculative execution = OoO + branch prediction + Exception handling (1 hour)

• Baseline model and out-of-order completion.
• Tomasulo algorithm: step 1.
• Tomasulo algorithm: step 2.
• Branch prediction.
• Exception handling.
• Speculative execution.

Week 3: Advanced topics on cache design (1 hour)

• Fundamentals of memory design.
• The 3C model.
• Replacement algorithms.
• Prefetching algorithms.
• Memory systems (DRAM).
• Memory systems (Virtual memory and virtualization).

Week 4: Multicore design: multithreading and cache coherence (1 hour)

• Multicore design challenges.
• Multithreading fundamentals.
• Multithreading design alternatives (fine/course, SMT).
• Cache coherence concepts.
• Interconnection concepts.
• Putting it together.