Processor Architecture

Coffee lake die shot

In this section of the course, we will learn details of how to design a processor core. The processor core is the “brain” of the computing system. It reads in (fetches) instructions from memory, figures out what the instruction is supposed to do (decodes it), and performs the task(s) of the instruction (executes it).

ISA and Machine Representation

RISC-V logo

We will begin with what should be a review of ISAs and machine representation of instructions. These topics were covered mostly in ECS 50. However, we will be using the RISC-V open source ISA. If you did not take ECS 50 or find yourself struggling to keep up in this first set of lectures, please refer to Chapter 2 in Computer Organization and Design.

154B Assignment 1 DUE 1/19

201A Assignment 1 DUE 1/19

See Machine code examples VIDEO for some helpful hints.

Single cycle processor design

Next, we will talk about how to design a single-cycle CPU. This design will use combinational logic to do all of the steps to complete an instruction in a single cycle. 154B Assignment 1 and 154B Assignment 2 have you implement this design in Chisel. This design is covered in Section 4.3 and 4.4 of Computer Organization and Design.

154B Assignment 2 DUE 1/29

201A Assignment 2 DUE 1/29

Pipelined processor design

After covering the basics of processor design, we will start optimizing this design to try to get better performance and come closer to how real systems like the one pictured above is designed. Our first optimization will be adding pipelining to our design. This is covered in Section 4.5 and 4.6 of Computer Organization and Design and is the basis for Assignment 3.

154B Assignment 3.1 DUE 2/5 (soft due date)

Instruction level parallelism

Finally, we will introduce the idea of instruction level parallelism and introduce a couple of algorithms that can be used to extract performance from scalar (not parallel) applications. Most of this topic is covered in the graduate level computer architecture course (ECS 201A), but we will touch on some of these topics in this class.

154B Assignment 3.2 DUE 2/16

201A Assignment 3 DUE 2/16

Test

Midterm **in-person on 2/7