This course aims to get students familiar with various contemporary micro-computer system architectures.

After successful completion of this course, student will know internal structure and implementation details of basic blocks of contemporary micro-computer systems. Besides, students will be able to fully design and implement a simple microprocessor core on programmable logic platform, using some of the standard hardware description languages.

Processor design methodology. Processor specification. Instruction set variations. RISC/CISC dichotomy. Processor building blocks (adders, simple ALUs, multipliers, dividers, floating point). Building a datapath. Control unit design and implementation. An overview of pipelining. Pipelined datapath and control. Hazards and Exceptions. Real world example: the Arm Cortex-a53 and Intel core i7 pipelines. Using a hardware design language to describe, model and implement a simple CPU. Memory technologies. The basics of caches. Measuring and improving cache performance. Dependable memory hierarchy. Virtual machines. Virtual memory. Using a finite-state machine to control a simple cache. Real world example: the Arm Cortex-a53 and Intel core i7 memory hierarchies. Real world example: the rest of the Armv8 system and special instructions. MIPS examples. RISCV examples.

Lectures, labs and consultations.