| Summary: | Emphasizes the relationship among technology, hardware organization, and programming systems in the evolution of computer architecture. Pipelined, out-of-order, and speculative execution. Superscaler, VLIW, vector, and multithreaded processors. Addressing structures and virtual memory, and exception handling. I/O and memory systems. Parallel computers; message passing and shared memory systems. Memory models, synchronization, and cache coherence protocols. Vector supercomputers. Assumes an undergraduate knowledge of computer systems. From the course home page: Course Description 6.823 is a study of the evolution of computer architecture and the factors influencing the design of hardware and software elements of computer systems. Topics may include: instruction set design; processor micro-architecture and pipelining; cache and virtual memory organizations; protection and sharing; I/O and interrupts; in-order and out-of-order superscalar architectures; VLIW machines; vector supercomputers; multithreaded architectures; symmetric multiprocessors; and parallel computers.
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