Comparative Architectures

Lecturer: Dr I.A. Pratt (iap10@cl.cam.ac.uk)

No. of lectures: 8

Prerequisite course: Computer Design

Aims

This course examines the architecture and implementation of state-of-the-art microprocessors and memory systems. It begins by examining the different design goals that microprocessors are developed for, and discusses the difficulties associated with making objective performance comparisons.

Features of a number of popular Instruction Set Architectures are compared and contrasted, with particular attention to their effects on implementation and hence performance. The second half of the course addresses micro-architecture implementation issues, examining how Instruction Level Parallelism can be exploited through deep pipelining and super-scalar techniques such as out-of-order execution. Finally, issues in memory hierarchy design are explored.

Lectures

• Comparing architectures. The technology curve. System versus chip performance. Speed: MIPS, MHz, FLOPS, SPEC. Power. Price. Compatibility. Features.

• Instruction set architecture. Amdahl's law and RISC principles. Byte sex. Word size. Stacks, Accumulators and GPRs. Load-store versus register-memory. Addressing modes. Code density. Sub-word and un-aligned loads and stores. [2 lectures]

• Advanced pipelining. The CPU performance equation. Structural hazards: long latency instructions. Data hazards: result forwarding and delayed loads. Control hazards: optimising branches, and avoiding branches. Exceptions. [2 lectures]

• Instruction level parallelism. Super-scalar. Static scheduling and dynamic out-of-order execution. Register renaming. The limits of ILP. [2 lectures]

• Memory hierarchy. Cache configurations. Latency versus bandwidth. Re-ordering and coherence. Programming for caches.

Objectives

At the end of the course students should

• appreciate the balance between implementation and architecture in determining performance

• understand how quantitative analysis led to the convergence towards RISC-like designs

• comprehend the issues associated with deeply-pipelined designs

• understand the operation of processors supporting out-of-order execution

• be able to describe the difficulties associated with building wide-issue machines, and have a basic understanding of the alternatives to Instruction Level Parallelism

• appreciate the tradeoffs made by architects in the design of memory hierarchies

• be able to write algorithms optimised for particular memory hierarchies

Recommended books

Hennessy, J. & Patterson, D. (1996). Computer Architecture: a Quantitative Approach (Chapters 1-5 in particular). Morgan Kaufmann (2nd ed.).

Further reading and reference:

Tannenbaum, A.S. (1990). Structured Computer Organization. Prentice-Hall (2nd ed.).
Van Someren, A. & Atack, C. (1994). The ARM RISC Chip: a Programmer's Guide. Addison-Wesley.
Sites, R.L. (ed.) (1992). Alpha Architecture Reference Manual. Digital Press.
Kane, G. & Heinrich, J. (1992). MIPS RISC Architecture. Prentice-Hall.
Messmer, H. (1995). The Indispensable Pentium Book. Addison-Wesley.
The CPU Info Center http://infopad.eecs.berkeley.edu/CIC/tech/