Computer Organization and Architecture: Course outline (CS2603)

Introduction to computer systems: Information is bits + context, programs are translated by other programs into different forms, it pays to understand how compilation systems work, processors read and interpret instructions stored in memory, caches matter, storage devices form a hierarchy, the operating system manages the hardware, systems communicate with other systems using networks; Representing and manipulating information: information storage, integer representations, integer arithmetic, floating point; Machine-level representation of programs: a historical perspective, program encodings, data formats, accessing information, arithmetic and logical operations, control, procedures, array allocation and access, heterogeneous data structures, putting it together: understanding pointers, life in the real world: using the gdb debugger, outof-bounds memory references and buffer overflow, x86-64: extending ia32 to 64 bits,  machine-level representations of floating-point programs; Processor architecture: the Y86 instruction set architecture, logic design and the Hardware Control Language  (HCL), sequential Y86 implementations, general principles of pipelining, pipelined Y86 implementations