Papers: 00, 01, 02, 03
ISA goals. What makes an ISA good? What makes an ISA easy to compile for? Know the basic features that distinguish ISAs like VAX, RISC (Alpha and others), and EPIC (IA-64)
Papers: 04, 05, 06, 07
Out of order execution: reservations, register renaming, instruction decoding, in-order retirement
Branch prediction: strategies, local/global. Know tournament predictors from 21264)
Papers: 08, 09, 10
Understand the main strategies behind these machines. You don't need to know anything about their caches (except the existence of a trace cache in Pentium 4), feature sizes, clock rates, etc.
Last modified: Sat May 5 11:48:22 MDT 2007