EE 361L Lab 3: CPU Reports

October 15, 2012

Objectives

Students will work in groups of 2 and do research on a CPU architecture (if there are an odd number of students in a section, the TA can form one group of 3.  Another option is a student does research on his or her own). Some example architectures are

You can find other processors in the survey "Great Microprocessors of the Past and Present" , which can be found in the CPU Shack.

Each group does an oral presentation and a written report about their architectures. The reports should contain information on the following topics:

  1. Technology (brief)
  2. Architecture (includes instruction set architecture)
  3. Pipeline structure.  This is discussed in Chapter 6 of the textbook.  There will be an overview of pipelining in one of the lab sections.
  4. Memory (main and virtual)

Note that we will not have covered (yet) many of these topics such as pipelining, superscalar, scoreboarding, out of order execution, branch hardware, caching.  But do the research as best you can.  This may require some research on what is pipelining, what is superscalar, etc.  Many if not all of these concepts can be found in the textbook.  For example Chapter 6 covers pipelining, and Chapter 7 covers caching.  Though you may be unable to understand the details of these concepts, you should get the general idea.

The TA will present a brief tutorial on computer architecture to familiarize students with many of the concepts.

You can also find tutorials on the web.  Here some examples:

Assignment

The TA will organize the ordering of the talks for these days, and will let you know a week in advance.  So be prepared to give your talk on your turn.

Instructions on how the oral presentations should be organized and delivered, and how they will be graded:

Preparation Help:  The UH-Manoa campus has a web site for its oral communication (O) focus courses.  At the bottom of the web page you can find Teacher Resources which has a number of useful links, e.g.,:

Grading

Writing style will account for 50% of the grade, oral presentation style will account for 25% of the grade, and content will account for 25% of the grade.  Note that the heavy weight of writing style is to insure that the course meets the hallmarks of a writing-intensive class.