CSE 378: Machine Organization and Assembly Language

Ben Dugan, Spring 2002

Course Outline (Subject to change)

1. Introduction to architecture and organization (Chapter 1) [Week 1]
2. Machines & Logic Design (Appendix B)
3. General Purpose Machines (Hardware) (Ch 3.1-3.5 ;Ch 4.1-4.4) [Week 1]
   • General computer structure
   • Memory structures: registers, information units, addressing
   • CPU components
4. 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
5. General Purpose Machines (Sofware) (A.1-A.4 Ch3.9) [Week 3]
   • Assemblers
   • Linkers
   • Loaders
   • Compilers
6. Procedures and stacks (Chapter 3.6, Appendix A.7) [Week 4]
7. Performance metrics (Chapter 2) [Week 4]
8. ISA Survey: RISC, CISC, etc. (Chapter 3.12, and skim VAX ISA) [Week 4]
9. Processor implementation. Single cycle implementation (Chapter 5) [Week 5]
   • Data path.
   • Multi-cycle implementation. Control.
   • Control alternative: microprogramming
10. Processor implementation. Pipelining (Chapter 6) [Week 6,7]
    • Data path.
    • Data hazards. Forwarding.
    • Control hazards. Delayed branching. Branch prediction
11. Memory hierarchy. Caches (Chapter 7.1-7.2) [Week 8]
    • Cache organization.
    • Cache write policies.
12. Memory hierarchy. Virtual Memory (Chapter 7.3-7.7) [Week 9]
    • Multiprogamming.
    • Paging.
    • Virtual address translation: page tables and TLBs.
13. Input-Output (Chapter 8) [Week 10]
    • I/O architecture. Buses.
    • I/O devices. Disks
    • I/O control
14. Possibly one or more of the following topics:
    • Floating-point. Arithmetic and functional units (Chapter 4)
    • Parallel machines (Chapter 9)
    • Networks