COMP2230

Course Title: 
Computer Architecture & Organisation
Credits: 
4
Educational Level: 
II
Semester offered: 
II
Associated Programme: 
B.Sc. CS
Core Course: 
yes
Syllabus: 
  • Tour of computer systems
  • Representation and manipulation of information:
    • Computer arithmetic
    • Instruction set architecture design and machine-level representation of programs
    • Basic processor organization
    • Single cycle datapath and control unit
    • Multicycle processor design
    • Microprogramming
    • Exceptions, Interrupts and traps
    • Pipelining
    • Memory hierarchy and Virtual memory
    • RISC Architectures
    • Instruction-level parallelism, superscalar, multithreaded and EPIC architectures
    • Case Studies: MMIX, Itanium, and PowerPC
    • Optimizing Program Performance
    • Measuring a program execution time
Course Assessment: 
  • Final Exam (2-hours long)     60%
  • Coursework       40%

Students will be required to pass both the coursework and the final examination to pass the course.

Course Prerequisites: 

COMP2101 (CS20S)