CSE 431
Computer Architecture
Fall 2008
Read Me
Mary Jane Irwin ( www.cse.psu.edu/~mji )
www.cse.psu.edu/~cg431
[Adapted from Computer Organization and Design, 4th Edition,
Patterson & Hennessy, © 2008, MK]
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Permissions to Use Conditions

The slides have evolved over a period of ten+ years, originating with
slides developed by Dave Patterson for the first edition of Computer
Organization and Design. Since then, they have gone through
extensive revisions (both by me and by various UCB faculty). With
the publication of the 4rd edition, I again revised and updated the
entire slide set to coincide with the new edition.
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They are all now in Microsoft ppt 2007, if you are still using 2003, you’re out of
luck
Permission is granted to copy and distribute and/or alter and
distributed this slide set for educational purposes only, provided that
the complete bibliographic citation and following credit line is
included: "Adapted from Computer Organization and Design, 4th
Edition, Patterson & Hennessy, © 2008.” This material may not be
copied or distributed for commercial purposes without express
written permission of the copyright holders.
I also ask that you acknowledge my (considerable) efforts in some
way. One way is to acknowledge that your slides are adapted from
mine on the first slide of each lecture that you use - or to retain my
copyright if the slides are simply copied and distributed.
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CSE 431 Course Details

The slides set is for a 15 week (full semester) senior and first year
graduate level course in computer science and engineering (CSE). It
is a required course for both undergraduate computer engineering
majors and undergraduate computer science majors. It is also taken
by CSE graduate computer science and engineering students
(usually early in their graduate career and often in preparation for
PSU’s PhD candidacy exams).
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My goals for CSE 431 is that the student understand the
organizational paradigms that determine the capabilities and
performance of computer systems, the interactions between the
computer’s architecture and its software so that future software
designers (compiler writers, operating system designers, database
programmers, …) can achieve the best cost-performance trade-offs
and so that future architects understand the effects of their design
choices on software applications.
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Course Structure

CSE 431’s prerequisite is a sophomore level course in computer
organization (which also uses Computer Organization and Design,
Patterson & Hennessy, © 2008 Chapters 1 (parts of), 2, 3, and 4
(parts of) (along with one lecture on pipelining, one on caches and
two on I/O)). Slides for this organization course, based on the 3nd
edition (I won’t get around to updating those until Fall 2009), are also
available. Since the students were supposed to already know this
material, it was only reviewed (and quickly!) in CSE 431.
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CSE 331 is the course where they learn MIPS assembler and do a design of a
simple MIPS processor in VHDL or verilog. So I assume they already know
MIPS assembler and how the basic, single cycle MIPS datapath works.
This made room in CSE 431 for three lectures on dynamic
(superscalar) processors. I developed lectures on that material
which is as consistent as I could make it with the text book based on
the architecture defined in Guri Sohi’s paper in IEEE Trans. On
Computing, Mar. 1990.
The (rough) outline for CSE 431 is included (see the next slide).
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Course Outline
Wk
Topic
COD 4 Reading
1
Introduction and performance metrics
1
2
MIPS ISA review
2
3
MIPS arithmetic review; floating point
3
4
MIPS datapath and control review
4.1-4.4
5
MIPS pipelined datapath, data and control hazards
4.5-4.9
6
A MIPS SS execution model
4.10-4.14, Sohi
7
SS fetch, decode, and register dataflow issues
Sohi
8
Catch-up, review and midterm examination
Midterm exam week
9
Memory hierarchies; cache basics review
5.1-5.2
10
Improving cache performance, cache coherence
5.3, 5.7-5.13
11
Architecture support for virtual memory
5.4-5.6
12
Disk systems, RAIDs; I/O systems
6
13
Multiprocessor intro; SMPs and MMPs and SMT
7.1-7.5
14
GPUs; Network connected multi’s, network topologies
7.6-7.8
15
Performance models; technology trends and future
directions
7.9-7.14
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Course Assignments/Grading
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In addition to homework problems selected from the Exercises
included in the book, the students also do a series of simulation
experiments using SimpleScalar. We selected five of the
benchmarks (that we knew ran fairly quickly) and precompiled them
for the students.
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They experimented with branch prediction for a single issue, in-order
machine in the first SimpleScalar assignment
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They experimented with a multiple issue, out-or order machine and
compared it to the results from the first set of experiments in the second
assignment.
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They experimented with different cache sizes, line sizes, associativities,
latencies, cache levels, etc. in the third assignment.
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They were given an baseline single issue, in-order machine with a
baseline memory system and asked to come up with their “best”
alternative design (with some prei-mposed constraints to limit the search
space) in the fourth assignment.
There was a single midterm (I don’t have the stamina any more to
give and grade two exams during the semester) and a final exam.
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A Bit About the Slides Themselves
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These slides were being developed at the same time that the final
draft of the book was being polished (as I prepare these ReadMe
notes at the end of the semester, I just received my printed copy
of the 4th Edition). I did not have access to the figures, pictures,
tables, etc. in the book. Some of them have been recreated (by
hand), others are from the web (with appropriate credits). Adding
and/or replacing figures when the book figures are available
might be advisable.
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The graphs included in the slides from the book have been
converted into powerpoint “comic” graphs so that they could be
animated effectively. The data used to construct the graph is
only approximate; it was constructed to make the graphs as
similar to the graphs in the book as possible (once again, I didn’t
have the actual data to work from).
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The notes section contains backup for each slide from the book
and, in places, from the original UCB slides.
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Each slide set ends with a reminder slide which you will want to
replace with your own set of reminders to the students !
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Keeping Your Students Awake and Involved
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One thing that I have started doing so I can call on students by
name (and maybe learn their names) is to make name tents for
each student which they pick up at the beginning of class and
return at the end of class (those that aren’t picked up I collect
during the lecture so I can “take roll” off-line – yes, ugh, I now do
that and give a small amount of credit for class attendance). I
use the medium tent cards from Office Depot and print the name
on both sides so they can also learn each others names!
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Throughout the set of slides, you will often see two slides that are
almost identical. One is for the class handout and is missing
some key points (it is usually marked in the notes section as “for
class handout”). The other is for lecture (marked “for lecture”)
where the key points are included and are animated to appear as
students respond to questions posed to them in class.
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Put the “for lecture” slide in hide mode when preparing class
handouts and the “for class handouts” in hide mode when preparing
lectures
A sample pair of slides follows
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Datapath with Forwarding Hardware
PCSrc
1
ID/EX
0
EX/MEM
Control
IF/ID
Add
Shift
left 2
4
PC
Instruction
Memory
Read
Address
Add
Read Addr 1
Data
Memory
Register Read
Read Addr 2Data 1
File
Write Addr
Write Data
16
Sign
Extend
MEM/WB
Branch
ALU
Read
Data 2
1
Address
Read
Data
0
Write Data
0
32
1
ALU
cntrl
EX/MEM.RegisterRd
0
1
IF/ID.RegisterRs
IF/ID.RegisterRt
CSE431 ReadMe.10
Forward
Unit
MEM/WB.RegisterRd
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