- Introduction to architecture and organization (Chapter 1)
- Signed and unsigned numbers (Chapter 4. Sections 4.1 to 4.3)
- Instruction set and assembly language (Chapter 3)
- General computer structure
- Memory structures: registers, information units, addressing
- CPU: instructions
- An example architecture: The MIPS 2000 (Chapter 3 and Appendix A)
- Introduction to SPIM
- Overview of MIPS: registers, data types, addressing.
- Arithmetic-logic instructions;
- Load and store instructions; branches
- Instruction encoding; addressing revisited.
- Procedures and stacks (Chapter 3)
- RISC vs. CISC (Section 3.12)
- Performance metrics (Chapter 2)
- Processor implementation. Single cycle implementation (Chapter 5)
- Data path.
- Multiple cycle implementation. Control.
- A control alternative: microprogramming
- Processor implementation. Pipelining (Chapter 6)
- Data path
- Data hazards. Forwarding
- Control hazards.
- Memory Hierarchy. Caches (Chapter 7)
- Cache organization. Parameters
- Cache write policies
- Memory Hierarchy. Virtual Memory (Chapter 7)
- Multiprogramming
- Paging
- Virtual address translation: page tables and TLB's
- Input-Output (Chapter 8)
- I/O architecture. Buses.
- I/O devices.
- I/O control
- One or more of the following topics
- Networks
- Floating-point. Arithmetic and functional units (Chapter 4)
- Parallel computers (Chapter 9)
