Computer Architecture

CS401
Sabanci University erkays@sabanciuniv.edu

5/5/2012

Erkay Savas

Outline
Brief Overview What is under a computer program Components Roadmap for this class

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Things You will be Learning

How computers work; the basic foundation How to analyze their performance and how not to Key technologies determining the modern processor performance
Datapath Pipeline Cache Memory Hierarchy I/O Multiprocessors

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Below the Software

Abstraction
Delving into the depths reveals more information An abstraction omits unneeded detail, helps us cope with complexity Computers might be very different from what we think they are when we look at it at the hardware level. In fact, they can be communicated only by sending them electrical signals: HIGH/LOW voltage First level of abstraction is to designate these signals as TRUE/FALSE and 1/0 We often think that the true language of the computers is binary numbers
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Instruction Set Architecture

Important abstraction

Or features available to programmers

interface between hardware and low-level software instructions e.g. does a computer have an multiply instruction? instruction coding number of bits to represent data I/O mechanism. addressing mechanism 80x86/Pentium/K6, PowerPC, DEC Alpha, MIPS, SPARC, HP, ARM.
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Modern instruction set architectures:

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Organization
Organization is how features are implemented in hardware
Transparent to programmers different implementations of the same architecture Control signals, interfaces, memory technology. e.g. Is there a hardware multiply unit or is it done by repeated addition?

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How to Program a Computer?

Most natural way is to encode whatever you want to tell the computer to do with electrical signals (on and off) Of course, we need something simpler to work with Machine Code Assembly language High-level languages
C/C++, Pascal, Fortran, Java, C# since this is the only thing it understands

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Processing a C Program
High-level language program (in C)
swap (int v[], int k){ int temp; temp = v[k]; v[k] = v[k+1]; v[k+1] = temp; }

Assembly language program for MIPS C compiler

swap: muli add lw lw sw sw jr

$2, $2, $15, $16, $16, $15, $31

$5, 4 $4, $2 0($2) 4($2) 0($2) 4($2)

Binary machine language program for MIPS

0000000010100001000000000001 10000000000010001110000110000 01000011000110001100010000000 00000000001000110011110010000 00000000001001010110011110010 00000000000000001010110001100 01000000000000001000000001111 1000000000000000001000

Erkay Savas

Assembler

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Functions of a Computer
Data processing Data storage Data movement Control

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Functions of a Computer
source & destination of data data movements apparatus

Control mechanism Data storage facility

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Data processing facility

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Five Classic Components

Computer Processor
Datapath Memory Input

Control

Output

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System Interconnection

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Motherboard
PS/2 connectors

USB 2.0

Parallel/Serial

Sound

SIMM Sockets PCI Card Slots

Processor

IDE Connectors
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Inside the Processor Chip

Instruction Cache Control
branch prediction

Data Cache

Bus

integer floating-point datapath datapath

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Computer
peripherals CPU

I/O

computer

System interconnection
Memory

network

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CPU

ALU

Registers

CPU

Internal CPU interconnection Cache Memory Control Unit

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Memory
Nonvolatile:
ROM Hard disk, floppy disk, magnetic tape, CDROM, USB Memory

Volatile
DRAM used usually for main memory SRAM used mainly for on-chip memory such as register and cache DRAM is much less expensive than SRAM SRAM is much faster than DRAM
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DRAM and Processor Characteristics

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Solutions to Memory Problems

Increase number of bits retrieved at one time
Make DRAM wider rather than deeper

Change DRAM interface

Cache

Reduce frequency of memory access

More complex cache and cache on chip

Increase interconnection bandwidth

High speed buses Hierarchy of buses
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Computer Networks
Very essential aspect of computer systems
Communication Resource sharing Remote access

Ethernet is the most popular LAN

Wide Area Networks (WAN)

Range is limited to 1 kilometer 3 Mbit/s to 10 Gbit/s Coaxial cable to twisted pair to optical fiber Cross continents and backbone of the Internet
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Roadmap
Performance issues Instruction set of MIPS Arithmetic and ALU Constructing a processor to execute our instructions (datapath design) Pipelining Memory hierarchy: caches and virtual memory I/O Multiprocessors
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