OPAL

We will study the architecture and organization of the newest microprocessors currently on the market, and the latest developments in computer architecture research.
You will learn to quantify design decisions in terms of performance and cost.

• Basic principles (such as instruction set design, pipelining, and pipelining consequences).
• VLIW (very long instruction word), superpipelined, superscalar, SIMD (single instruction, multiple data), and MIMD (multiple instruction, multiple data) architectures.
• Out-of-order, branch prediction and speculative execution.
• SMT (Simultaneous Multi-Threading).
• Design of advanced memory hierarchies, prefetching.
• Multi-core architectures, memory coherence and consistency, multi-threading.

Exercise

• MIPS64 assembly programming.
  
• Accelerating functions with x86 SIMD intrinsics.
• Investigate the performance impact of superscalar processors using SimpleScalar.
• Creating as close to ideal threads to get maximum and minimum performance when using SMT.