COMPUTER ARCHITECTURES-FOUNDATIONS

The teaching falls within the basic educational activities of the degree course in Computer Science.
The course emphasizes the hardware/software interface of computers: students will learn the foundations and the basics techniques involved in the design of the main components of a computer: Processor - Input/Output - Memory.
It also permits to deepen the knowledge on the machine/assembly levels of a conventional computer.

The course aims at the following results.

Knowledge and understanding. The student:
- Will master the specific technical terminology.
- Will be able to recognize and understand the theoretical foundations and techniques for designing the main components of a computer.
- Will be familiar with the digital information representation and the Boolean logic operations.
- Will understand the complexity of modern computer architectures and their influence on software design and performance.

Ability to apply knowledge and understanding:

The student will be able to carry out exercises applying the knowledge acquired in the various topics of the course; in particular, on the representation and conversion of integer numeric values, on the implementation of logical circuits, on the parallelism at instructions level (pipeline), on the implementation of the memory hierarchies.

- Basics of mathematics and logic.

- Computer organization and abstraction levels
- Information representation, computer arithmetics, Boolean algebra
- Machine instructions: MIPS processor, basic notions
- Combinatorial/sequential circuits
- Advanced CPU project and instruction level parallelism: pipeline
- Memory hierarchies: cache
- Virtual memory
- Input and Output

- David A. Patterson, John L. Hennessy. "Computer Organization and Design MIPS Edition: The Hardware/Software Interface", 6th edition (2020). ISBN: 9780128201091
- Professor's and tutoring lecture notes.

The exam is written with a time limit of 2 hours.
The aim of the test is to verify the student proficiency and knowledge of the various topics covered during the course, including theoretical questions and practical exercises requiring a direct application of theoretical knowledge.

The exam will include practical exercises and theoretical open-ended questions. The total score (30 points) is assigned as follows:
Exercise (4 points): Information representation, combinatorial/sequential circuits
Exercise (5 points): Cache memory
Exercise (5 points): Dependencies between instructions in pipelined CPU, performances
Theoretical open-ended questions (total 16 points) on the course topics.

- Frontal theoretical lessons
- Practical examples are shown by the teacher on emulators
- Exercises

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