comp326-f25 -- Computer Architecture
About comp326-f25	English (USA)
In most computer-architecture courses, the topics are whatever is in the most recent edition of Hennessy and Patterson's _Computer Architecture_. In my view, this is half the story. Of equal importance are the four challenges of computer architecture: the parallelism challenge, the bandwidth challenge, the latency challenge, and the power challenge. Particular designs are merely attempts to meet these challenges. The usual list of topics is: review of static instruction scheduling, careful study of dynamic instruction scheduling in CPUs, data-level parallelism (in vectors and GPUs), and a bit on parallel computing under the misleading umbrella term "thread-level parallelism", with treatments of cache coherence and memory consistency. Networks are typically slighted. And, if time permits, there is a discussion of how general-purpose computing died and was replaced by domain-specific computer architectures. To see the collection of prior postings to the list, visit the comp326-f25 Archives. (The current archive is only available to the list members.)
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