Introduction to Computer

Architecture
Lecture 01

Instructor: Tapushe Rabaya Toma

Sr. Lecturer, SWE, DIU.
 Reference Books
• Computer Organization and Architecture:
Designing for Performance- William Stallings
(8th Edition)
– Any later edition is fine
 What Is Computer Architecture?

Computer Architecture =
Instruction Set Architecture + Machine
Organization

3
 Instruction Set Architecture
• ISA = attributes of the computing system as
seen by the programmer
– Organization of programmable storage
– Data types & data structures
– Instruction set
– Instruction formats
– Modes of addressing
– Exception handling

4
 Machine Organization
• Capabilities & performance characteristics of
principal functional units (e.g., registers, ALU,
shifters, logic units)
• Ways in which these components are
interconnected
• Information flow between components
• Logic and means by which such information flow
is controlled

5
 Definitions
• Computer architecture refers to those attributes
of a system visible to a programmer or
• Those attributes that have a direct impact on the
logical execution of a program
• Examples of architectural attributes: Instruction
set, the number of bits used to represent various
data types (e.g., numbers, characters), I/O
mechanisms, and techniques for addressing
memory
 Definitions
• For example, it is an architectural design issue
whether a computer will have a multiply
instruction
• On the other hand, it is an organizational issue
whether that instruction will be implemented
by a special multiply unit or by a mechanism
that makes repeated use of the add unit of the
system
 STRUCTURE AND FUNCTION
• A computer is a complex system
• The hierarchical nature of complex systems is essential to both
their design and their description
• The designer need only deal with a particular level of the system
at a time
• At each level, the system consists of a set of components and
their interrelationships and the designer is concerned with
associated structure and function:
– Structure: The way in which the components are interrelated
– Function: The operation of each individual component as
part of the structure
Functional View of a Computer
 Functional units
• In general terms, there are only four functional units:
• Data processing: The computer must be able to process data
– The data may take a wide variety of forms, and the range of processing
requirements is broad
• Data storage: It is also essential that a computer store data
• If the computer is processing data on the fly (i.e., data come in and get
processed, and the results go out immediately), the computer must
temporarily store at least those pieces of data that are being worked on at
any given moment
– Thus, there is at least a short-term data storage function
• Equally important, the computer performs a long-term data storage function
also
• Files of data are stored on the computer for subsequent retrieval and update
 Functional units
• Data movement: The computer must be able to move data between itself and the
outside world
• The computer’s operating environment consists of devices that serve as either
sources or destinations of data
• When data are received from or delivered to a device that is directly connected to
the computer, the process is known as input–output(I/O), and the device is referred
to as a peripheral
• When data are moved over longer distances, to or from a remote device, the process
is known as data communications
• Control: There must be control of these three functions
• This control is exercised by the individual(s) who provides the computer with
instructions
• Within the computer, a control unit manages the computer’s resources and
orchestrates the performance of its functional parts in response to those instructions
 Possible Operations

• The computer can function as a data movement device (Figure 1), simply
transferring data from one peripheral or communications line to another
• It can also function as a data storage device (Figure 2), with data
transferred from the external environment to computer storage (read) and
vice versa (write)
 Possible Operations

• The final two diagrams show operations involving data

processing, on data either in storage (Figure 3) or en route
between storage and the external environment (Figure 4)
 Structural Units/Components

• This is the simplest possible depiction of a computer

• The computer interacts in some fashion with its external environment
• In general, all of its linkages to the external environment can be classified as peripheral
devices or communication lines
 Structural Units/Components
• There are four main structural components:
• Central processing unit (CPU): Controls the operation of the
computer and performs its data processing functions
– Often simply referred to as processor
• Main memory: Stores data
• I/O: Moves data between the computer and its external
environment
• System interconnection: Some mechanism that provides for
communication among CPU, main memory, and I/O
• A common example of system interconnection is by means of a
system bus, consisting of a number of conducting wires to which all
the other components attach
Top-Level Structure
 Evolution of Computers
• First Generation: Vacuum Tubes
– The ENIAC (Electronic Numerical Integrator And Computer)
– Designed and constructed at the University of Pennsylvania
– World’s first general purpose electronic digital computer
• Second Generation: Transistors
• The first major change in the electronic computer came with the
replacement of the vacuum tube by the transistor
– The transistor was invented at Bell Labs in 1947
• The transistor is smaller, cheaper, and dissipates less heat than a vacuum
tube but can be used in the same way as a vacuum tube to construct
computers
• Unlike the vacuum tube, which requires wires, metal plates, a glass capsule,
and a vacuum, the transistor is a solid-state device, made from silicon
 Evolution of Computers
• Third Generation and forth: Integrated Circuits
• A single, self-contained transistor is called a discrete component
• Throughout the 1950s and early 1960s, electronic equipment was composed
largely of discrete components—transistors, resistors, capacitors, and so on
• Discrete components were manufactured separately, packaged in their own
containers, and soldered or wired together onto masonite-like circuit boards,
which were then installed in computers, oscilloscopes, and other electronic
equipment
• Whenever an electronic device called for a transistor, a little tube of metal
containing a pinhead-sized piece of silicon had to be soldered to a circuit board
• The entire manufacturing process, from transistor to circuit board, was
expensive and cumbersome
• In 1958 came the achievement that revolutionized electronics and started the
era of microelectronics: the invention of the integrated circuit
 Evolution of Computers
• Microelectronics means, literally, “small electronics”
• The basic elements of a digital computer: only two fundamental
types of components are required
– Gates and memory cells
• A gate is a device that implements a simple Boolean or logical
function, such as IF A AND B ARE TRUE THEN C IS TRUE (AND gate)
• Such devices are called gates because they control data flow in much
the same way that canal gates do
• The memory cell is a device that can store one bit of data; that is,
the device can be in one of two stable states at any time
• By interconnecting large numbers of these fundamental devices, we
can construct a computer
 Evolution of Computers
• Four basic functions could be related to these two components as follows:
• Data storage: Provided by memory cells
• Data processing: Provided by gates
• Data movement: The paths among components are used to move data from memory
to memory and from memory through gates to memory
• Control: The paths among components can carry control signals
• For example, a gate will have one or two data inputs plus a control signal input that
activates the gate
• When the control signal is ON, the gate performs its function on the data inputs and
produces a data output
• Similarly, the memory cell will store the bit that is on its input lead when the WRITE
control signal is ON and will place the bit that is in the cell on its output lead when the
READ control signal is ON
• The integrated circuit exploits the fact that such components can be fabricated from a
semiconductor such as silicon (Si)
Relationship Among Wafer, Chip, and Gate
 Fabrication of Integrated Circuits
• A thin wafer of silicon is divided into a matrix of small areas,
each a few millimeters square
• The identical circuit pattern is fabricated in each area, and
the wafer is broken up into chips
• Each chip consists of many gates and/or memory cells plus a
number of input and output attachment points
• This chip is then packaged in housing that protects it and
provides pins for attachment to devices beyond the chip
• A number of these packages can then be interconnected on
a printed circuit board to produce larger and more complex
circuits
 Fabrication of Integrated Circuits
• Initially, only a few gates or memory cells could
be reliably manufactured and packaged
together
• These early integrated circuits are referred to as
small-scale integration (SSI)
• As time went on, it became possible to pack
more and more components on the same chip
• And so comes the terms- LSI, MSI, VLSI and ULSI
Moore’s law
 Moore’s law
• The consequences of Moore’s law are profound:
1) The cost of a chip has remained virtually unchanged during this period of
rapid growth in density
– This means that the cost of computer logic and memory circuitry has fallen at a
dramatic rate
2) Because logic and memory elements are placed closer together on more
densely packed chips, the electrical path length is shortened, increasing
operating speed.
3) The computer becomes smaller, making it more convenient to place in a
variety of environments
4) There is a reduction in power and cooling requirements
5) The interconnections on the integrated circuit are much more reliable than
solder connections
– With more circuitry on each chip, there are fewer inter-chip connections
Comparison – Among Generations
 PERFORMANCE ASSESSMENT
• In evaluating processor hardware and setting
requirements for new systems, following parameters are
important
– Performance (key parameter)
– Cost
– Size
– Security
– Reliability
– Power consumption
• Difficult to make meaningful performance comparisons
– Should make use of traditional performance measures
 Clock Speed and Instructions per Second
• THE SYSTEM CLOCK
• Operations performed by a processor, such as fetching an instruction, decoding
the instruction, performing an arithmetic operation, and so on, are governed by
a system clock. Typically, all operations begin with the pulse of the clock.
– The speed of a processor is dictated by the pulse frequency produced by the clock,
measured in cycles per second, or Hertz (Hz)
• Typically, clock signals are generated by a quartz crystal, which generates a
constant signal wave while power is applied
• This wave is converted into a digital voltage pulse stream that is provided in a
constant flow to the processor circuitry
• For example, a 1-GHz processor receives 1 billion pulses per second
• The rate of pulses is known as the clock rate, or clock speed
• One increment, or pulse, of the clock is referred to as a clock cycle, or a clock tick
– The time between pulses is the cycle time
Clock Speed and Instructions per Second
 Clock Speed and Instructions per Second
• The execution of an instruction involves a number of
discrete steps, such as-
– fetching the instruction from memory, decoding the
various portions of the instruction, loading and storing
data, and performing arithmetic and logical operations
• Thus, most instructions on most processors require multiple
clock cycles to complete
• Some instructions may take only a few cycles, while others
require dozens
– A straight comparison of clock speeds on different
processors does not tell the whole story about
performance
 Clock Speed and Instructions per Second
• INSTRUCTION EXECUTION RATE
•  
• A processor is driven by a clock with a constant frequency f or,
equivalently, a constant cycle time τ, where τ = 1/f
• Define the instruction count, , for a program as the number of machine
instructions executed for that program until it runs to completion or for
some defined time interval
• An important parameter is the average cycles per instruction CPI for a
program
• If all instructions required the same number of clock cycles, then CPI
would be a constant value for a processor
• On any given processor, the number of clock cycles required varies for
different types of instructions, such as load, store, branch, and so on
 Clock Speed and Instructions per Second

• Let CPIi be the number of cycles required for

instruction type i and I i be the number of
executed instructions of type i for a given
program
• Then we can calculate an overall CPI as
follows: n

 CPI  I i i
CPI  i 1

Ic
 Clock Speed and Instructions per Second
• The processor time T needed to execute a given program can be expressed as:

T  I c  CPI 
• We can refine this formulation by recognizing that during the execution of an instruction, part
of the work is done by the processor, and part of the time a word is being transferred to or
from memory
• In this latter case, the time to transfer depends on the memory cycle time, which may be
greater than the processor cycle time
• We can rewrite the preceding equation as

T  I C   p  (m  k ) 
• where p is the number of processor cycles needed to decode and execute the instruction, m
is the number of memory references needed, and k is the ratio between memory cycle time
and processor cycle time
• The five performance factors in the preceding equation (Ic, p, m, k, τ ) are influenced by four
system attributes: the design of the instruction set (known as instruction set architecture),
compiler technology (how effective the compiler is in producing an efficient machine language
program from a high-level language program), processor implementation, and cache and
memory hierarchy
 Clock Speed and Instructions per Second
• For the multi-cycle MIPS, there are 5 types of instructions:
– Load (5 cycles)
– Store (4 cycles)
– R-type (4 cycles)
– Branch (3 cycles)
– Jump (3 cycles)
• If a program has:
– 50% load instructions
– 15% R-type instructions
– 25% store instructions
– 8% branch instructions
– 2% jump instructions
– then, the CPI is:
 Clock Speed and Instructions per Second
• A 400-MHz processor was used to execute a benchmark program with the
following instruction mix and clock cycle count:
• Instruction type Instruction count Clock cycle count Integer arithmetic 45000 1
Data transfer 32000 2 Floating point 15000 2 Control transfer 8000 2
• Total instruction count = 100000
• Determine the effective CPI, MIPS rate, and execution time for this program.
 Clock Speed and Instructions per Second
•
•   1.55
• Effective Processor Performance

• Execution Time(T)
 Clock Speed and Instructions per Second
• A common measure of performance for a processor is the rate at
which instructions are executed, expressed as millions of
instructions per second (MIPS), referred to as the MIPS rate
• We can express the MIPS rate in terms of the clock rate and CPI as
follows:   𝐼
𝐶
𝑀𝐼𝑃𝑆 𝑟𝑎𝑡𝑒 = 6
𝑇 ×1 0
• Consider the execution of a program which results in the execution
of 2 million instructions on a 400-MHz processor
• The program consists of four major types of instructions
• The instruction mix and the CPI for each instruction type are given
below based on the result of a program trace experiment
 Clock Speed and Instructions per Second

 • The average CPI when the program is executed on a

uniprocessor with the above trace results is CPI = 0.6 + (2 ×
0.18) + (4 × 0.12) + (8 × 0.1) = 2.24
• The corresponding MIPS rate is (400 × ) / (2.24 × ) 178
 Clock Speed and Instructions per Second

• Another common performance measure deals

only with floating-point instructions
• These are common in many scientific and
game applications
• Floating point performance is expressed as
millions of floating-point operations per
second (MFLOPS), defined as follows:
 Benchmarks
• Measures such as MIPS and MFLOPS have proven
inadequate to evaluating the performance of processors
• Because of differences in instruction sets, the instruction
execution rate is not a valid means of comparing the
performance of different architectures
• RISC and CISC machines may not be rated with same
MIPS rating but may do same amount of work at the
same time
• Moreover, the performance of a given processor on a
given program may not be useful in determining how
that processor will perform on a very different type of
application
 Amdahl’s Law
• First proposed by Gene Amdahl
• Deals with the potential speedup of a program using multiple
processors compared to a single processor
• Consider a program running on a single processor such that a
fraction (1 - f) of the execution time involves code that is
inherently serial and a fraction f that involves code that is infinitely
parallelizable with no scheduling overhead
• Let T be the total execution time of the program using a single
processor
• Then the speedup using a parallel processor with N processors
that fully exploits the parallel portion of the program is as follows:
time to execute program on a single processor
Speedup 
time to execute program on N parallel processors
 Amdahl’s Law

𝑇 (1− 𝑓 )+𝑇𝑓 
  1
¿ ¿
𝑇𝑓 𝑓
𝑇 (1 − 𝑓 )+ (1− 𝑓 )+
• 𝑁
Two important conclusions 𝑁 be drawn:
can
1) When f is small, the use of parallel processors
has little effect
2) As N approaches infinity, speedup is bound by 1/
(1 - f), so that there are diminishing returns for
using more processors
 Amdahl’s Law
• Amdahl’s law can be generalized to evaluate
any design or technical improvement in a
computer system
• Consider any enhancement to a feature of a
system that results in a speedup
• The speedup can be expressed as:
Performanc e after enhancement
Speedup 
Performanc e before enhancement
 Amdahl’s Law
Execution time before enhancement
Speedup 
Execution time after enhancement
 •
Suppose that a feature of the system is used during
execution a fraction of the time f, before enhancement,
and that speedup of that feature after enhancement is .
Then the overall speedup of the system is

Note: is often represented by Speedup factor “K”.

 Amdahl’s Law
• Suppose that a task makes extensive use of floating-
point operations, with 40% of the time is consumed by
floating-point operations. With a new hardware design,
the floating-point module is speeded up by a factor of 10.
What is the overall speedup?
Thank you!