COMPUTER ARCHITECTURES-FOUNDATIONS

The teaching falls within the basic educational activities of the degree course in Computer Science.
Students will learn the foundations and the 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.
Finally, the course emphasizes the hardware/software interface of computers.

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 of integer and real numeric values, on the logical design of circuits, on the parallelism at instructions level, 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 lecture notes

The exam is written with a time limit of 2 hours. The aim is to test the student proficiency with respect to the various topics of the course, including theoretical aspects and practical exercises.

Exam content: 4 exercises and 3 theoretical open-ended questions.

Exam evaluation:
Exercise 1 (4 points): Information representation
Exercise 2 (4 points): Combinatorial/sequential circuits
Exercise 3 (5 points): Cache memory
Exercise 4 (5 points): Dependencies between instructions and temporal execution diagram of a CPU
Theoretical questions (total 12 points) on the course topics.

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

English

written