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ECE 18-447: Introduction to Computer Architecture

ECE 18-447: Introduction to Computer Architecture (Spring 2013, Carnegie Mellon Univ.). Instructor: Professor Onur Mutlu. Computer architecture is the science and art of selecting and interconnecting hardware components and designing the hardware/software interface to create a computer that meets functional, performance, energy consumption, cost, and other specific goals. This course introduces the basic hardware structure of a modern programmable computer, including the basic laws underlying performance evaluation. We will learn, for example, how to design the control and data path hardware for a ARM-like processor, how to make machine instructions execute simultaneously through pipelining and simple superscalar execution, and how to design fast memory and storage systems. The principles presented in the lecture are reinforced in the laboratory through the design and simulation of a register transfer level (RTL) implementation of a MIPS-like pipelined processor in Verilog. In addition, we will develop a cycle-accurate simulator of this processor in C, and we will use this simulator to explore processor design options. (from ece.cmu.edu)