DM548, 2020 — Material

The main text book is

William Stallings: Computer Organization and Architecture — Designing for Performance, Global Edition, 10th edition, Pearson, 2015.

It can be bought in the book store.

Introduction

• Chapter 1 and 2.

• Lecture slides

• Examples from the lecture

Supplemental Material

• Video, “What’s Your Computer Actually Doing?”, Tom Scott

• Video, “Von Neumann Architecture”, Computerphile

• Video, “EDSAC Rebuild (Cambridge University’s 1st Computer)”, Computerphile

• Video, “Punch Card Programming”, Computerphile

• Video, “Mainframes and the Unix Revolution”, Computerphile

• Video, “The Factory of Ideas: Working at Bell Labs”, Computerphile

• Video, “UNIX Special: Profs Kernighan & Brailsford”, Computerphile

• Video, “Bell Labs’ Research (Prof Brian Kernighan)”, Computerphile

• Video, “Is it the End for Moore’s Law?”, Computerphile

• Video, “Hello (World) Abstraction!”, Computerphile

Instruction Sets and x86-64 Assembly

• Chapter 12 and 13.

• Lecture slides

• Examples from the lecture

• Notes on Automated Testing and Feedback in DM548

• Introduction to GDB

• Slides on makefiles, examples

• Lab 1: exercises, snippet.s

• Lab 2: exercises, utils.s

• Lab 3: exercises, utils.s

• Lab 4 (the last assembly lab): unsolved exercises from previous labs, and then Assignment 1.

Additional Resources

• x86(-64) Instruction Reference (note that the order of operands is the reverse of the AT&T syntax)

• Table of x86-64 Linux system calls

  • Use “man 2 <syscall name>” to get the man page for a specific system call.

• x86 Assembly Wiki book

  • SSE, Streaming SIMD Extensions

• GNU Assembler (GAS) documentation

  • Assembler Directives

• GNU Debugger (GDB) documentation

  • TUI, the Text User Interface.

  • Dashboard, a prettier and much more advanced interface for GDB.

• Getting started on Windows 10:

  1. Install WSL (or WSL 2), e.g., see Ubuntu/Linux on Windows.

  2. See the Ubuntu instructions.

• Getting started on Ubuntu: install the package build-essential. This is already installed on the machines in the IMADA Computer Lab.

• Getting started on macOS: unfortunately I have not yet found a good way to install the required programs. Please install your favorite Linux distribution in a virtual machine, or use the IMADA Computer Lab instead.

Supplemental Material

• Video, “Characters, Symbols and the Unicode Miracle”, Computerphile

• Video, “Endianness Explained With an Egg”, Computerphile

• Video, “GOTO, Goto & Goto”, Computerphile

• Video, “Essentials: Hidden Pointers”, Computerphile

• Video, “Bootstrapping EDSAC: Initial Order”, Computerphile

• Video, “Hello World (Assemblers, Considered Harmful?!)”, Computerphile

• Video, “Wheeler Jump”, Computerphile

• Video, “ESSENTIALS: Subroutines & The Wheeler Jump”, Computerphile

• Video, “What is Bootstrapping?”, Computerphile

Computer Arithmetic

• Chapter 9 and 10.

• Lecture slides (updated 14 Sep)

• Exercises: Sheet 1

Supplemental Material

• Video, “Binary Addition & Overflow”, Computerphile

• Video, “Binary: Plusses & Minuses (Why We Use Two’s Complement)”, Computerphile

• Video, “Floating Point Numbers”, Computerphile

• Video, “Floating Point Numbers (Part1: Fp vs Fixed)”, Computerphile

• Video, “Floating Point Numbers (Part2: Fp Addition)”, Computerphile

• Video, “Why Use Binary?”, Computerphile

• Video, “Where did Bytes Come From?”, Computerphile

Digital Logic

• Chapter 11.

• Lecture slides (updated 17 Sep)

Supplemental Material

• Video, “AND OR NOT”, Computerphile

• Video, “XOR & the Half Adder”, Computerphile

• Video, “How Computer Memory Works”, Computerphile

• Video, “Flip Flops, Latches & Memory Details”, Computerphile

• Video, “Addressing Memory (Pt1)”, Computerphile

A Top-Level View and Interconnection Structures

• Chapter 3 and Appendix C.

• Lecture slides

• Examples from the lecture

Supplemental Material

• Video, “Program, Interrupted”, Computerphile

• Video, “Computer Connections”, Computerphile

• Video, “Inside the CPU”, Computerphile

• Video, “MegaProcessor”, Computerphile

• Video, “Multi Programming”, Computerphile

• Video, “OS Context Switching”, Computerphile

• https://en.wikichip.org

  • https://en.wikichip.org/wiki/intel/microarchitectures/skylake_(client)#SoC_design

  • https://en.wikichip.org/wiki/intel/microarchitectures/coffee_lake#Overview

Cache Memory

• Chapter 4

• Lecture slides

Supplemental Material

• Video, “Why do CPUs Need Caches?”, Computerphile

• https://en.wikichip.org

  • https://en.wikichip.org/wiki/intel/microarchitectures/coffee_lake#Memory_Hierarchy

Internal and External Memory

• Chapter 5 and 6.

• Lecture slides

Supplemental Material

• Video, “Magnetic Media (Floppies and Tapes)”, Computerphile

• Video, “Error Detection and Flipping the Bits”, Computerphile

• Video, “Error Correction”, Computerphile

• Video, “Multiple Dimension Error Correction”, Computerphile

• Video, “Correcting Those Errors”, Computerphile

• Video, “The Perfect Code”, Computerphile

• Video, “Error Correction & International Book Codes”, Computerphile

• Video, “Reed Solomon Encoding”, Computerphile

• Video, “Hamming codes, h■w to ov■rco■e n■ise”, 3Blue1Brown

• Video, “Hamming codes part 2, the elegance of it all”, 3Blue1Brown

I/O

• Chapter 7.

• Lecture slides

Processor Structure and Function

• Chapter 14.

• Lecture slides

Supplemental Material

• Video, “Computer Speeds”, Computerphile

Additional Resources

• https://en.wikichip.org

  • Sandy Bridge, Pipeline

  • Skylake, Pipeline

  • Zen, Pipeline

  • Cortex-A76, Pipeline

  • Zen 2, Branch Prediction Unit

• https://wiki.osdev.org

• Software optimization resources, Agner Fog

RISC

• Chapter 15.

• Lecture slides

Superscalar Processors

• Chapter 16.

• Lecture slides

Additional Resources

• https://en.wikichip.org

  • Sandy Bridge, Pipeline

  • Skylake, Pipeline

  • Zen, Pipeline

  • Cortex-A76, Pipeline

• Video, “CPUs Are Out of Order”, Computerphile

• Video, “Spectre & Meltdown”, Computerphile

• Software optimization resources, Agner Fog

• Appendix N

Parallel Processing and Multicore

• Chapter 17 and 18.

• Lecture slides

Additional Resources

• Video, “Multiple Processor Systems”, Computerphile

• Video, “Additional Processors”, Computerphile

• Ring Interconnect

• Mesh Interconnect

• Video, “What’s Behind Port Smash?”, Computerphile

• PortSmash, snoop on another process in processors with simultaneous multi-threading (SMT), e.g., HyperThreading.

• Zen

Control Unit and Microprogramming

• Chapter 20 and 21.

• Lecture slides

Additional Resources

• Sandy Bridge Microarchitecture

• Software optimization resources, Agner Fog

System Programming in C

• Introduction: lecture slides, examples

• I/O: lecture slides

• User-defined types: lecture slides, examples

• Dynamic memory: lecture slides, examples

• Various: lecture slides, examples

• Libraries: lecture slides, examples

• Slides on makefiles, examples

• Lab 1: exercises

• Lab 2: exercises, LinkedList_String.h

• Lab 3: exercises, BinaryTree.h, BinaryTree.c

• Notes on Automated Testing and Feedback in DM548

• Introduction to GDB

Additional Resources

• https://en.cppreference.com

  • The C Language

• Sanitizers:

  • GDB and ASan

• Compiler Explorer

• A Visualiser of C Execution

• GNU Debugger (GDB) documentation

  • TUI, the Text User Interface.

  • Dashboard, a prettier and much more advanced interface for GDB.

• GNU Make documentation

Supplemental Material

• Video, “‘C’ Programming Language: Brian Kernighan”, Computerphile

• Video, “Why C is so Influential”, Computerphile

• Video, “Essentials: Pointer Power!”, Computerphile

Exercise Sessions

See the Exam section for a link to a selection of old exam sets.

• Sheet 1

• Sheet 2

• Sheet 3

• Sheet 4

• Sheet 5

• Sheet 6