CS 7491 - [The Great Instruction Set Architectures]

Spring. Not offered: 2024-2025. Next offered: 2025-2026. 1 credit. S/U grades only.

A. Sampson.

From the ENIAC to the latest Xeon, the overwhelming majority of computer systems in history have embodied a single programming paradigm: the von Neumann architecture. Machines appear to process streams of instructions one at a time, modifying the state of memory and registers at each step. But far more exotic ISAs are possible. This course is a survey of the breadth of strange and unfamiliar ISA paradigms that have appeared and disappeared over 75 years of computing. This is a reading and discussion seminar that will cover one paper per week.