CS8491 Computer Architecture Syllabus:

CS8491 Computer Architecture Syllabus – Anna University Regulation 2017

OBJECTIVES:

• To learn the basic structure and operations of a computer.
• To learn the arithmetic and logic unit and implementation of fixed-point and floating point arithmetic unit.
• To learn the basics of pipelined execution.
• To understand parallelism and multi-core processors.
• To understand the memory hierarchies, cache memories and virtual memories.
• To learn the different ways of communication with I/O devices.

UNIT I BASIC STRUCTURE OF A COMPUTER SYSTEM

Functional Units – Basic Operational Concepts – Performance – Instructions: Language of the Computer – Operations, Operands – Instruction representation – Logical operations – decision making – MIPS Addressing.

UNIT II ARITHMETIC FOR COMPUTERS

Addition and Subtraction – Multiplication – Division – Floating Point Representation – Floating Point Operations – Subword Parallelism

UNIT III PROCESSOR AND CONTROL UNIT

A Basic MIPS implementation – Building a Datapath – Control Implementation Scheme – Pipelining – Pipelined datapath and control – Handling Data Hazards & Control Hazards – Exceptions.

UNIT IV PARALLELISIM

Parallel processing challenges – Flynn’s classification – SISD, MIMD, SIMD, SPMD, and Vector Architectures – Hardware multithreading – Multi-core processors and other Shared Memory Multiprocessors – Introduction to Graphics Processing Units, Clusters, Warehouse Scale Computers and other Message-Passing Multiprocessors.

UNIT V MEMORY & I/O SYSTEMS

Memory Hierarchy – memory technologies – cache memory – measuring and improving cache performance – virtual memory, TLB’s – Accessing I/O Devices – Interrupts – Direct Memory Access – Bus structure – Bus operation – Arbitration – Interface circuits – USB.

TEXT BOOKS:

1. David A. Patterson and John L. Hennessy, Computer Organization and Design: The Hardware/Software Interface, Fifth Edition, Morgan Kaufmann / Elsevier, 2014.
2. Carl Hamacher, Zvonko Vranesic, Safwat Zaky and Naraig Manjikian, Computer Organization and Embedded Systems, Sixth Edition, Tata McGraw Hill, 2012.

REFERENCES:

1. William Stallings, Computer Organization and Architecture – Designing for Performance, Eighth Edition, Pearson Education, 2010.
2. John P. Hayes, Computer Architecture and Organization, Third Edition, Tata McGraw Hill, 2012.
3. John L. Hennessey and David A. Patterson, Computer Architecture – A Quantitative Approach‖, Morgan Kaufmann / Elsevier Publishers, Fifth Edition, 2012.