Computer architecture Period 4 (1DT033)

Teaching Staff

• Teacher: Justin Pearson

• Lab assistant: David Eklov

Schedule

• When and where

Course material

Books:

• The course text book is: Computer Organization and Design, Fourth Edition, Fourth Edition: The Hardware/Software Interface (The Morgan Kaufmann Series in Computer Architecture and Design) if you have the old book "Andrew S. Tanenbaum. Structuered Computer Organization" then for lab and assignments we recommend the book by John Waldrom. Introduction to RISC Assembly Language Programming.

Slides:

• As yet the course is in a bit of flux and the when we use slides will be in a bit of flux. I'll try to keep this updated.

• Please note the dates given here might not be correct. As ever timeedit has the correct dates.

Lecture	Date	Topic and Link to Slides
1	19/3	Introduction to the course
2	24/3	Introduction to the MIPS processor and simple arithmetic
3	26/3	MIPS memory organisation
4	12/4	Making Decisions
5	13/4	Continue the previous lecture on functions stakcs and register conventions
6	26/4	Odds and ends on Assembly lanugage slides
7	27/4	Processor Implementation
8	5/5	These slides are useful , but we will go through the start of these slides
9	10/5	Processor Implementation Pipelines These are the old slides, we will continue on the slides from the previous lecture.
10	11/5	Caches and Virtual Memory
11	17/5	I/O
12	19/5	Floating point and number representation.

Reading List

Reading list for the textbook Computer Organization and Design, 4th Edition, Patterson and Hennessy

• Chapter 1, you won't be examined on anything directly in this chapter but it is good background.
• Chapter 2, All of the chapter.
• Chapter 4, 4.1-4.9
• Chapter 5, 5.1-5.5
• Chapter 6 6.1-6.6
• Appendix B. B.7

Links

• Slides and old exams
• Interesting stuff
• Mars MIPS simulator this looks a lot better than

xspim and easier to compile on various systems. I have not had a chance to evaluate it but next year I think that I will use it over xspim.

Lab and assignments

• Checkout this page for more guidance on labs and assignments.
• Submission and corrections will be handled by the Course Manager. Details on how to register in the system are given here.

Tutorials

• Tutorial 1 Introduction to SPIM, the MIPS Simulator
• Tutorial 2 More on SPIM/MIPS

Compulsory Lab

• Stacks and Subroutines

Compulsory Assignments

• Assignment 1 MIPS assembly

• Assignment 2 MIPS assembly, memory mapped I/O