Introduction to Computer Architecture
Course Handout
The following materials are available for those in the cam.ac.uk domain. Lectures are being presented live. For videos - see below.
Missing Video of Lecture
Lecture 12 failed to record due to equipment failure in Lecture Theatre 1. We've restored the lecture given in 2022, but that doesn't show the slides! The version given by Prof Timothy Jones in 2021 is available on YouTube. Very little has changed for this lecture.
Laboratories
The ECAD+Arch laboratory sessions are loosely coupled to this lecture course. Please review the laboratory pages since there is a compulsory component.
Supervision Exercises
Recommended text
Computer Organization and Design - the hardware/software interface (RISC-V edition), Patterson and Hennessy, 2017.
Supervision Guide
Supervision exercises are available here: Supervision Questions (PDF). Supervisors can find sample answers on the supervisors tab.
Additional Material
- The RISC-V instruction set reference manual is available from the RISC-V foundation as a PDF
Past Exam Questions
Please note that the course used to be called Computer Design, so past exam questions are under that title: Past Exam Questions in Computer Design
Errata
- The paper version of the handout and slides misses of some of the CHERI-RISC-V team members. A more complete list is on the electronic copy.
- Lecture 4, Slide 17: the branch offset was specified in terms of
the number of instructions but it should have been specified in
terms of the number of bytes. But note that in practise the offset
is in the machine code is in half word (two byte) offsets.
Corrected slide:
- Lecture 5, Slide 6: the shift immediate instructions were
incorrectly listed as being in R-type format. Corrected slide:
