Computer Architecture Summary - Topics you need to know

This is the curriculum/study plan for many computer architecture courses: 

Dalle generated photo of a computer chip

Please read the Computer Organization and Designand read my other MIPS blog posts too!

 RISC vs CISC

• Instruction set
• Micro-architecture

• Endianness (Big vs Little)

  • Where is the MSB?

Unsigned vs signed numbers

• 2’s complement

• Signed bit 

Instruction Types 

• 6 bit opcode

• I Type

• Immediate value range 

• Branch limitations 

• Addi, etc. 

• R Type

• Shifting (logical vs arithmetic)

• Add, LW etc. 

• J Type 

• Limitations of jump range  

• J vs JAL

Procedures (mainly for the lab)

• Using the stack

• JR and JAL

Stages

• IF

• ID

• EX

• MEM

• WB

Single Cycle

• Datapath

• ALU

• Registers

• Stages

Multi Cycle 

• Datapath

• Additional lines

• Differences between single and multi cycle

Pipeline

• Differences from single and multi cycle to pipeline

• Possible Hazards

• Hazard detection unit

• Forwarding unit

• How to fix them

Adding new commands/modifying MIPS hardware

• Example: Add a JAL command to a single-cycle basic datapath

Boolean arithmetic 

• Addition 

• Subtraction

• Multiplication

• Booth's algorithm 

Floating point (single precision)

• Convert a decimal number to FP and vis-versa

• Addition 

• Subtraction

• Multiplication

Benchmarks and comparisons 

• Amdahl's Law

• MIPS

• MFLOPS (we brushed upon this)

• Clock Cycle

• CPI

• Other formulas

Memory

• Tri-state and Data bus 

• Memory Hierarchy

• DRAM vs SRAM 

• 1D vs 2D

• Locality of space vs time 

• Hit rate/Miss rate

• Models

• Fully associative
• N-way set associative 
• Direct mapping
• Policies/Miscellaneous 
• Write back
• Write through
• Write allocate
• No write allocate
• LRU

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