Advanced Topics in Computer Architecture

Lecture Slides

Seminar 1 - Trends in Computer Architecture

Seminar 2 - Prediction

Seminar 3 - Prefetching

Reading List

Presentation schedule — if you have any issues please let the lecturers know.

Week 2: State-of-the-art Processor Design

• Qualcomm Oryon CPU in Snapdragon X Elite: Micro-Architecture and Design Williams and Knanpathipillai, IEEE Micro, 45(3), pp. 8–14, May–June 2025.
  [ IEEE Xplore ]
• Scalable, Programmable and Dense: The HammerBlade Open-Source RISC-V Manycore Jung et al. ISCA-51, June 2024.
  IEEE Xplore ]
• XiangShan: An Open Source Project for High-Performance RISC-V Processors Meeting Industrial-Grade Standards Wang et al. IEEE Micro, 45(3), pp.49-57, May-June 2025.
  IEEE Xplore ]

Week 3: Branch prediction and speculative execution

• Whisper: Profile-Guided Branch Misprediction Elimination for Data Center Applications Khan, Ugur, Nathella, Sunwoo, Litz, Jiménez and Kasikci, MICRO 2022.
  [IEEE Xplore]
• The Last-Level Branch Predictor Schall, Sandberg and Grot, MICRO 2024.
  [IEEE Xplore]
• Timely, Efficient, and Accurate Branch Precomputation Deshmukh, Cai and Patt, MICRO 2024.
  [IEEE Xplore]

Other optional material for week 3

• Thermometer: Profile-Guided BTB Replacement for Data Center Applications Song, Khan, Shahri, Sriraman, Soundararajan, Subramoney, Jiménez, Litz and Kasikci, ISCA 2022.
  [ACM DL]
• Skia: Exposing Shadow Branches Pepi, Godala, Tibrewala, Chacon, Gratz, Jiménez, Pokam and August, ASPLOS 2025.
  [ACM DL]

Week 4: Memory system design

• Prodigy: Improving the Memory Latency of Data-Indirect Irregular Workloads Using Hardware-Software Co-Design Talati, May, Behroozi, Yang, Kaszyk, Vasiladiotis, Verma, Li, Nguyen, Sun, Morton, Ahmadi, Austin, O'Boyle, Mahlke, Mudge and Dreslinski, HPCA 2021.
  [IEEE Xplore]
• Berti: an Accurate Local-Delta Data Prefetcher Navarro-Torres, Panda, Alastruey-Benedé, Ibáñez,Viñals-Yúfera and Ros, MICRO 2022
  [IEEE Xplore]
• Triangel: A High-Performance, Accurate, Timely On-Chip Temporal Prefetcher Ainsworth and Mukhanov, ISCA 2024.
  [IEEE Xplore]

Other optional material for week 4

• Decoupled Vector Runahead Naithani, Roelandts, Ainsworth, Jones and Eeckhout, MICRO 2023.
  [ACM DL]
• Profile-Guided Temporal Prefetching Li, Zhang, Gao, Fang, Lu, Ren and Xie, ISCA 2025.
  [ACM DL]

Week 5: Memory safety

• Avoiding TLB Shootdowns through Self-invalidating TLB Entries A. Awad, et. al, IEEE PACT 2017.
  [IEEE DL]
• NEVE: Nested Virtualization Extensions for ARM J.T. Lim, et. al, ACM SOSP 2017.
  [ACM DL]
• The Arm Morello Evaluation Platform—Validating CHERI-Based Security in a High-Performance System R. Grisenthwaite, et. al, HotChips 2023.
  [IEEE DL]

Other optional material for week 5

• It Is Time to Standardize Principles and Practices for Software Memory Safety. Communications of the ACM 68, 2 (February 2025), 40–45.
  [ACM DL (open access)]