CS6461 - Computer Architecture Fall 2016: - Introduction
CS6461 - Computer Architecture Fall 2016: - Introduction
Fall 2016
Lecture 1 Introduction
Adopted from Professor Stephen H. Kaislers Slides
Evaluate Existing
Implementation Systems for
Complexity Bottlenecks
Benchmarks
Technology
Trends
Implement Next
Simulate New
Generation System
Designs and
Organizations
Workloads
Computer Architecture:
Functional operation of the individual HW units within a computer
system, and the flow of information and control among them.
V A
O R
N C
H
N I
E T
U E
M C
A T
N U
N R
E
So:
Large on-chip caches
Prefetching hardware
Speculative Execution
Special-purpose instructions
Branch prediction
For the basic machine, to execute instructions we will probably need a few
functional units. The basic instruction execution cycle looks something like
this:
The Program Counter (PC) contains the address of the next instruction
to be executed. This address should be transferred to the Memory
Address Register (MAR). This takes 1 cycle.
On the next cycle, the Memory Control Unit (MCU) uses the address in
the MAR to fetch a word from memory. This fetch occurs in one
cycle. The word fetched from memory is placed in the Memory
Buffer Register (MBR).
5. Deposit Results