Midterm Topics

March 2, 2005

Administrative Notes

Topics

• Instruction Sets

  Be familiar with

  RISC I, VAX, Alpha, IA-64

  Be able to

  Compare important features of these instruction sets
  Construct small code sequences using instructions I give that are similar to instructions in these machines

• Microarchitecture

  Be familiar with

  Implementation of MIPS R10000, Pentium P4, Itanium
  Instruction flow in out-of-order machines using register renaming and supporting precise interrupts, branch prediction.

  Be able to

  Recognize dependences, follow instruction flow in pipelines (as above), construct reasonable pipelines from descriptions

• Memory Hierarchy

  Be familiar with

  Cache design (including victim caches), TLB management, page table organization (including inverted page tables)

  Be able to

  Show behavior of caches, TLBs, page tables. Derive sizes of tables and address widths