ELEC 5200-001/6200-001

Computer Architecture and Design

Spring 2007
Introduction
Vishwani D. Agrawal
James J. Danaher Professor
Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering
Auburn University, Auburn, AL 36849
http://www.eng.auburn.edu/~vagrawal
[email protected]

Spring 2008, Jan. 14 ELEC 5200-001/6200-001 Lecture 2 1

 Course Organization
Text book: D. A. Patterson and J. L. Hennessy,
Computer Organization & Design, the
Hardware/Software Interface, San Francisco,
California: Morgan Kaufman Publishers, Inc., 2005
(Third Edition).
Instructor: Vishwani D. Agrawal, Broun 323, x41853,
[email protected].
Graduate Assistants:
Nitin Yogi, MWF 12:00-1:00PM, Broun 362, 334-444-9713,
[email protected].
Khushboo Sheth, Broun 359, x41865, [email protected].
Classroom: Broun 306, MWF 11:00-11:50AM.
Lab: Broun 320.
Spring 2008, Jan. 14 ELEC 5200-001/6200-001 Lecture 2 2
 Author of the
Text Book

Communications of the ACM,

Volume 49, No. 4, April 2006,
Page 31
Spring 2008, Jan. 14 ELEC 5200-001/6200-001 Lecture 2 3
 Author of the Text Book

Spring 2008, Jan. 14 ELEC 5200-001/6200-001 Lecture 2 4

Student Performance Evaluation
Homeworks (30%): 1 per week, most
weeks.
Two Class Tests (24%): to be announced.
CPU Design Project (21%).
Final Exam (25%): Tuesday, May 2, 2008,
9-11:30AM, Broun 306.
Term Paper and Class Presentation by
ELEC6200 Students: “Satisfactory” grade
necessary; attendance necessary for
ELEC5200 students.
Spring 2008, Jan. 14 ELEC 5200-001/6200-001 Lecture 2 5
 Course Objective
Learn what a digital computer contains
and how it works.
Learn design concepts of a modern
computer.
Gain design experience (through project).

Spring 2008, Jan. 14 ELEC 5200-001/6200-001 Lecture 2 6

 The Concept of a Computer

Application software

Systems software

User Hardware

Operating system
compiler
assembler
Programs user
writes and runs

Spring 2008, Jan. 14 ELEC 5200-001/6200-001 Lecture 2 7

 Software
Compiler Assembler

Application software, MIPS compiler output, MIPS binary machine code:

a program in C: assembly language program:
00000000101000010000000000011000
00000000000110000001100000100001
swap (int v[ ], int k) swap; 10001100011000100000000000000000
{int temp; muli $2, $5, 4 10001100111100100000000000000100
10101100111100100000000000000000
temp = v[k]; add $2, $4, $2 10101100011000100000000000000100
v[k] = v[k+1]; lw $15, 0 ($2) 00000011111000000000000000001000
v[k+1] = temp; lw $16, 4 ($2)
} sw $16, 0 ($2)
sw $15, 4 ($2)
Application
software jr $31
Systems software

Hardware See pages 122-123

Spring 2008, Jan. 14 ELEC 5200-001/6200-001 Lecture 2 8

 The Hardware of a Computer

Input
Control

Datapath Memory
Central Processing
Unit (CPU)
Application
or “processor” Output
software
Systems software

Hardware

FIVE EASY PIECES

Spring 2008, Jan. 14 ELEC 5200-001/6200-001 Lecture 2 9

 Instruction Set Architecture (ISA)
A set of assembly language instructions (ISA)
provides a link between software and hardware.
Given an instruction set, software programmers
and hardware engineers work more or less
independently.
ISA is designed to extract the most performance
out of the available hardware technology.
Application

Instruction
software
Systems software

Software Hardware
set
Hardware

Spring 2008, Jan. 14 ELEC 5200-001/6200-001 Lecture 2 10

 ISA
Defines registers
Defines data transfer modes between registers,
memory and I/O
Types of ISA: RISC, CISC, VLIW, Superscalar
Examples:
– IBM370/X86/Pentium/K6 (CISC)
– PowerPC (Superscalar)
– Alpha (Superscalar)
– MIPS (RISC and Superscalar)
– Sparc (RISC), UltraSparc (Superscalar)

Spring 2008, Jan. 14 ELEC 5200-001/6200-001 Lecture 2 11

 Computer Architecture
Architecture: System attributes that have a
direct impact on the logical execution of a
program
Architecture is visible to a programmer:
– Instruction set
– Data representation
– I/O mechanisms
– Memory addressing

Spring 2008, Jan. 14 ELEC 5200-001/6200-001 Lecture 2 12

 Computer Organization
Organization: Physical details that are
transparent to a programmer, such as
– Hardware implementation of an instruction
– Control signals
– Memory technology used
Example: System/370 architecture has
been used in many IBM computers, which
widely differ in their organization.

Spring 2008, Jan. 14 ELEC 5200-001/6200-001 Lecture 2 13

 Architecture and Organization

ISA

Software Hardware
Programmers Engineers

Spring 2008, Jan. 14 ELEC 5200-001/6200-001 Lecture 2 14

 CPU Design Project
Design and implementation of a
processor:
– Define instruction set
– Design datapath and control hardware
– Implement hardware in FPGA
– Verify

Spring 2008, Jan. 14 ELEC 5200-001/6200-001 Lecture 2 15

 Research and Development
Instruction level parallelism (ILP)
Chip multi-processing (CMP)
Energy efficiency and low power design
Embedded systems
Network processing

Spring 2008, Jan. 14 ELEC 5200-001/6200-001 Lecture 2 16

 Summary
A computer processes digital data.
A user solves a problem by writing and/or running
a program written in a high-level programming
language like C.
Inside computer, system programs called
compiler and assembler break the user program
down into assembly code (instruction set) and
then into binary machine code.
The machine code is processed by the 5-piece
hardware (control unit, datapath, memory, input
and output) to obtain the desired result.

Spring 2008, Jan. 14 ELEC 5200-001/6200-001 Lecture 2 17