CMPE344

Instructor	Asst. Prof. Dr. Dogan Ulus ([email protected])
Lecture hours	Monday 11:00-12:00 and Tuesday 10:00-12:00
Final exam date	To be announced by the University
Prerequisites	CMPE240 (Digital Systems) or equivalent
Lab instructors	Emre Bilgili ([email protected]), Gökçe Uludogan ([email protected])
Lab sessions	Section#1: Friday 11:00-13:00, Section#2: Friday 14:00-16:00
Textbook	Patterson & Hennessy, Computer Organization & Design, RISC-V 2nd Edition
Resource(s)	Edson Borin, An Introduction to Assembly Programming with RISC-V

Course Learning Objectives

1. Understand the execution of machine instructions via RISC-V assembly programming
2. Understand the design principles and issues related to modern processors
3. Understand the design principles and issues related to hierarchical memory systems
4. Understand the design criteria for computers like performance, power efficiency, cost, and security
5. Get familiar with the history of computer design and recent developments in the field

Course Outline

1. Computers: Technology trends, design ideas, performance benchmarking.
2. Instruction set architecture; overview of RISC-V instruction set; alternative ISAs
3. Arithmetic for Computers: ALU Design, Floating Point operations
4. The Processor: Datapath, Control, Pipelining, Hazards, Exceptions, Parallelism
5. Memory: Technology, Cache Hierarchies, Cache Coherency, Memory Hierarchy, Virtual Memory
6. Parallelism: Vector Operations, Multi-threading, Multiprocessors, GPUs, Grid Computing

Laboratory Work

There will be laboratory experiments paralleling course topics. Attendance of the lab sessions is mandatory. Students must complete at least 70% of the experiments and get at least 60% from lab reports to pass the course. There will be a make-up week for students with valid excuses for missing a lab.

Grading

There will be two midterm exams (20% each) and one final exam (40%). Laboratory work will constitute 20% of the course grade.