ECE 4750 - Computer Architecture

(crosslisted)
(also CS 4420)

Fall. 4 credits.

Prerequisite: ECE 3140/CS 3420 or CS 3410. Culminating design experience (CDE) course.

Staff.

Topics include instruction set principles, advanced pipelining, data and control hazards, multi-cycle instructions, dynamic scheduling, out-of-order execution, speculation branch prediction, instruction-level parallelism, and high-performance memory hierarchies. Students learn the issues and trade-offs involved in the design of modern microprocessors. Labs involve the design of a processor and cache subsystem at the RTL level.

Outcome 1: Understand architectural innovations in modern microprocessors that enabled drastic performance improvements in the past twenty years.

Outcome 2: Understand the reasons and challenges in the recent transition to many-core processor architecture.

Outcome 3: Understand costs and performance in microprocessors and develop skills to evaluate architectural design choice.

Outcome 4: Design and Implement microprocessors in HDL (Verilog).

Outcome 5: Effectively work as a team and communicate with others.