Microprocessors

Microprocessors

1. Numbers

2. Characters, floats, ends, memory

   • IEE 754
   • Byte ordering
     • Big endian
     • Little endian
   • Memory
     • SRAM
     • DRAM
     • Latencies
     • DDR
   • ECC memory
     • Hamming code

3. Processor architecture

   • Busses
     • Speed
       • Determined by
         • Frequency
         • Width
         • Latency
     • Constraints
     • North & south bridges
       • North bridge
         • CPU
           • Front side
           • Back side
             • Cache
         • RAM
         • Graphics
       • South bridge
         • Disk
         • PCI slots
         • Ethernet
     • HyperTransport
     • Memory bus
     • System bus
     • Graphics bus
     • Multiprocessor
     • Disk connections
     • External bus
   • I/O
     • Port mapped
     • Memory mapped
     • I/O mechanisms
       • Polling
       • Interrupts
       • DMA
   • Execution
     • Fetch-Execute instruction cycle
       • Instruction set architectures
         • RISC
         • CISC
     • Increase performance
       • Clock frequency
       • Pipelines
         • Stalls
           • Hazards
             • Data
               • Stall
               • Forwarding
             • Control
               • Stall
               • Branch prediction
             • Structural
       • Cache
   • Registers
   • ALU
   • FPU
   • Cache
     • Hit
     • Miss
       • Handling misses
     • CPU time calculations
     • Associativity
       • Fully associative
       • Direct mapped
       • Set associative
     • Cache coherency
   • Vector units

4. Pentium processors

   • Superscalar execution
   • Register renaming
   • Branch prediction
   • Floating point ALU
   • Trends
   • P6 microarchitecture
     • P6 pipeline
   • Out of order execution
   • Instruction lifecycle
   • Reordering
   • Pentium 4
     • Trace cache
   • Backend
   • Decoding x86

5. Low power multicore architectures

   • Moore's law
   • Trend
   • Multithreading
   • Hyperthreading
   • Multicore approaches
     • Small number of 'big' cores
       • Core 2 Duo
       • Core i7 Nehalem
       • Core i7 3960 Sandy Bridge
     • Large number of 'small' cores
     • Asymmetric
   • Cell processor
   • Graphics card
   • Steaming processor
   • Vector processor