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Catalog Description:
Graduate survey of contemporary computer organizations covering: early systems, CPU design, instruction sets, control, processors, busses, ALU, memory, pipelined computers, multiprocessors, and case studies. Term paper or project required.

 
Prerequisites: CS 152, or equivalent.
Three hours of lecture per week.
Expanded Description:
Computer architecture is a vibrant and ever changing field; this course will attempt to convey that to students. It focuses on the design and implementation of computer architectures, as well as techniques for analyzing and comparing alternative computer organizations. Students will learn about styles of computer implementation and organization from a historical and modern perspective. Traditional concepts such as pipelining, instruction-level parallelism, memory hierarchies, and input/output architectures will be discussed. Further, modern issues such as data speculation, dynamic compilation, communication architecture, and VLSI scaling concerns will be introduced and discussed. Toward the end, cutting-edge paradigms such as DNA computation and quantum computing will be examined.

 
In addition to the textbook, this course includes a number of readings from research papers. Such papers are important for a number of reasons, not the least of which is to understand that design decisions are not always black and white. Students will also undertake a major computing systems analysis and design project of their own choosing.
Course Grading:
10% Class Participation
30% Homeworks (work in pairs)
30% Examinations (2 Quizzes)
30% Research Project (work in pairs)

See also Departmental Grading Guidelines for Graduate courses
 

Textbook:
photo of text cover J. L. Hennessy and D. A. Patterson, Computer Architecture: A Quantitative Approach, 2nd Edition, Morgan Kaufmann Publishing Co., Menlo Park, CA. 1996. 
ISBN: 1558603298 
Note that the 2nd edition is significantly different than the 1st edition, and it is not recommended that you attempt to use the 1st edition as a textbook for this course.
The errata sheet for the 2nd edition is available here. The first reader to report an error in the book and supply a correction that the authors incorporate in a future printing will be rewarded with a $1.00 bounty. To submit a bug, send a message to arc2bugs@mkp.com with the page number and line number of the error in the subject line. (Check the errata sheet first.) Typically these bugs are reviewed by the both publisher and the authors about once a year before checks are issued, so please be patient.
Here's one place to buy the book.
Additional Reading:
There will be no formal reader for this class. Required and recommended papers will be distributed in class; extras will be available at a place TBA.

 
One interesting resource that is now available (only to local Berkeley Hosts) is the ISCA 25-year retrospective in postscript and pdf. Several of the papers that we will be reading this term have retrospectives writen by the original authors that appar in this volume.
Communication:
The course newsgroup is ucb.class.cs252. The course-wide mailing list is cs252@kubi.cs.berkeley.edu. Announcements will be posted both on this web page and to the mailing list.
Other Useful Links
Last modified 8/23/99