CSE 378: Machine Organization and Assembly Language

Ben Dugan, Winter 2001

Course Outline (Subject to change)

1. Introduction to architecture and organization (Chapter 1) [Week 1]
2. Instruction set and assembly language (Chapter 3.1-3.7; Chapter 4.1-4.4) [Week 1]
   • General computer structure
   • Memory structures: registers, information units, addressing
   • CPU: instructions
3. Example architecture: The MIPS R2000 (Chapter 3 and Appendix A) [Week 2]
   • Introduction to SPIM
   • Overview of MIPS: registers, data types, addressing
   • Arithmetic-logical instructions; load and store; branches
   • Instruction encoding
4. Procedures and stacks (Chapter 3.6, Appendix A.7) [Week 3]
5. RISC vs. CISC (Chapter 3.8, Appendix E) [Week 4]
6. Performance metrics (Chapter 2) [Week 4]
7. Processor implementation. Single cycle implementation (Chapter 5) [Week 5]
   • Data path.
   • Multi-cycle implementation. Control.
   • Control alternative: microprogramming
8. Processor implementation. Pipelining (Chapter 6) [Week 6,7]
   • Data path.
   • Data hazards. Forwarding.
   • Control hazards. Delayed branching. Branch prediction
9. Memory hierarchy. Caches (Chapter 7.1-7.2) [Week 8]
   • Cache organization.
   • Cache write policies.
10. Memory hierarchy. Virtual Memory (Chapter 7.3-7.7) [Week 9]
    • Multiprogamming.
    • Paging.
    • Virtual address translation: page tables and TLBs.
11. Input-Output (Chapter 8) [Week 10]
    • I/O architecture. Buses.
    • I/O devices. Disks
    • I/O control
12. Possibly one or more of the following topics:
    • Floating-point. Arithmetic and functional units (Chapter 4)
    • Parallel machines (Chapter 9)
    • Networks