Computer Architecture

A Quantitative Approach — 6 Chapters

This course is based on the 6th edition of Computer Architecture: A Quantitative Approach. It explores the deep connection between C programming and hardware architecture.

Chapter 1
Quantitative Principles of Design
Performance benchmarks, silicon cost analysis, and power consumption in modern CPUs.
Chapter 2
Memory Hierarchy Design
Cache optimizations, locality, and bridging the CPU-Memory gap in system design.
Chapter 3
Instruction-Level Parallelism
Dynamic scheduling, branch prediction, and exploiting ILP for high performance.
Chapter 4
Data-Level Parallelism (SIMD)
Vector architectures, Graphics Processing Units (GPUs), and SIMD instruction sets.
Chapter 5
Thread-Level Parallelism
Multi-core scalability, cache coherence, and memory consistency models.
Chapter 6
Domain-Specific Architectures
TPUs, accelerators, and specialized silicon for modern workloads.