Weeks 1, 2
Introduction to machine and assembly instruction sets via MIPS
Week 2, 3
The system stack and function calling. Digital logic intro.
- [Read by 9/23] Patterson & Hennessy's
Section 2.8 Supporting Procedures in Computer Hardware for background on how the system stack
or call stack is used for function calling. If you want to read more on this topic,
you can search for system stack and call stack for more
information (e.g. Wikipedia's article on "call stack"
or this discussion).
- [Due 11:59 PM, 9/28] Implementing function calling in MIPS.
Submit your recursion.asm file via Moodle.
Weeks 4, 5
Digital logic from gates to larval datapaths. Takehome exam.
Week 6
Midterm break, multiplication hardware, designing circuits
Week 7
Datapaths
- [Due 11:59 PM, 11/2] Problem set on datapaths.
Submit as a PDF via Moodle.
- [Read by 11/2, if you haven't already]: Sections 4.5-8 of Patterson & Hennessy, 5th edition
Week 8
Pipelining, intro to memory hierarchies
- [Due 2:20 PM, 11/11] Takehome exam #2.
Submit as a PDF via Moodle.
- [Read soon]: Sections 5.1-4 and 5.8 of Patterson & Hennessy, 5th edition
Weeks 9, 10
Caches, wrap-up