Department of Computer Science
CS4431: Computer Architecture
Course Information and Syllabus
Fall 2007

Computer Architecture: A Quantitative Approach

Projects 50%

2 Midterm Exams 30%

Final Exam 20%

Projects must be submitted by the due date and time indicated on the assignment. Late assignments will receive NO credit.
If you miss a exam with a good reason (I decide if your reason is a good one), then the score you get on the next exam will be the score you will be given for the missing one. If you don't have a good reason you will get a 0 on the exam.
You must take the final exam at the officially scheduled time on Thursday, December 20, 10:15AM-12:15PM. You will not pass the course if you do not take the final exam. Please do not ask to take the final exam early.
If you come to me with a problem meeting a deadline or taking an exam BEFORE it is due I am pretty reasonable about deciding if an excuse is a good one. If you come to me afterwards I'll be very skeptical and will almost certainly require clear, written proof of whatever caused the problem.

Week	Topic	Readings
1	Fundamentals	Chapter 1
2	Instruction Set Principles	Appendix B
3,4	Pipelining	Appendix A
5	Instruction Level Parallelism	Chapter 2
6	Dynamic Branch Prediction	Chapter 2
7	Tomasulo's Algorithm	Chapter 2
7	Midterm 1
8	Hardware Based Speculation	Chapter 2
9	Advanced ILP Techniques, ILP Limits	Chapter 2,3
10	Memory Hierarchy	Chapter 5
11	Memory Hierarchy	Chapter 5
11	Midterm 2
Thanksgiving Break
12	Multiprocessors	Chapter 4
13	Multiprocessors	Chapter 4
14	Multiprocessors	Chapter 4
Final Exam, December 20, 10:15AM, Fisher 231