Asanovic/Devadas
Spring 2002
6.823
6.823
Computer System Architecture
Lecturers: Krste Asanovic, Srini Devadas
Asanovic/Devadas
Spring 2002
6.823
What’s 6.823 About?
• What’s under the “hood” of your desktop?
• How powerful is the “engine”?
• How much “gas” does it burn?
• How do you build one?
¾ From the Beta (6.004) RISC processor to the
Pentium-4
We won’t emphasize:
VLSI implementations
Parallel processing
Quantitative evaluation
Asanovic/Devadas
Spring 2002
6.823
Course Information
You must sign up for the course through the web
~7 Homeworks (30%) Midterm (30%) Final (40%)
Tutorials : One session / week
1 hour / session
All students must help grade homeworks once during
semester, signup sheets distributed during class
Asanovic/Devadas
Spring 2002
6.823
Course Information
(contd.)
Textbook: Hennessy and Patterson – Computer
Architecture: A Quantitative Approach
(strongly recommended)
Prerequisite material: Patterson and Hennessy –
Hardware/Software Interface book
¾ Some material in lectures will be from other sources
Tutorials: No new material introduced, reinforcement
of lecture content using examples
Asanovic/Devadas
Spring 2002
6.823
Problem Set 0
• Goal is to help you judge for yourself whether you
have prerequisites for this class
• We assume that you understand digital logic, a
simple 5-stage pipeline, and simple caches
• For this problem set only, work by yourself – not
in groups
• Due at start of class.