COMPUTER ARCHITECTURES-FOUNDATIONS

The teaching falls within the basic educational activities of the degree course in Computer Science.
It allows for learning foundations and techniques for 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.

Knowledge and understanding.

The student will have mastered the specific technical terminology.
She will be able to recognize and understand the theoretical foundations and techniques for designing the main components of a computer.
She will have knowledge on representation of information and on Boolean logic operations.
She will understand the complexity of modern computer architectures, and their influence on software design and performance.
Furthermore, the student will acquire knowledge on the level of machine / assembly programming, and on the translation of simple high-level programs in assembly language.

Ability to apply knowledge and understanding.

The student will be able to carry out exercises aimed at 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 the level of instructions, on the realization of the various levels of memory hierarchies, on assembly translation of high-level imperative programs.

No specific preliminary knowledge is required.

The Computer Architecture course is composed of two parts: Foundations (6 credits) and Laboratory (3 credits). The Foundations part includes the following contents:
- Computer organization and levels of abstraction
- Information representation, computer arithmetics, Boolean algebra
- Machine instructions: MIPS processor, basic notions
- Combinatorial/sequential circuits
- CPU project: single cycle and pipeline
- Memory hierarchies
- Input/Output

- David A. Patterson, John L. Hennessy. "Struttura e Progetto dei Calcolatori" Quinta edizione italiana condotta sulla sesta Edizione americana. Zanichelli, 2022.
- Professor's and tutoring lecture notes.

The course requires a two-hour written exam, divided into two parts.
The first part consists of a series of open-ended theoretical questions, to test the student's mastery of the various course topics and specific technical terminology.
The second part of the exam is related to the skill assessment, through the solution of exercises on the course subjects.

The written exam has a total score of 30 points, divided as follows: approximately 30% of the score is assigned to theoretical questions, while the remaining 70% is assigned to exercises.

The overall grade for the Computer Architecture course is the average (weighted by the number of credits) of the grades obtained in the two parts of the course, Foundations and Laboratory.

The course uses classical frontal teaching, with theoretical lessons and exercises.

Italian

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