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No Class on Monday

See you Wednesday for a wrap-up lecture. I'll also hand out the take-home final.

Project Description Posted

I uploaded the project description to Blackboard, in the assignments area. Due Wednesday, April 23 at the beginning of class. Let me know soon if you have problems compiling or running SimpleScalar.

No Class on 3/5 and 3/17

See you on the 19th. Enjoy break.

Questions on HW2

This one was hard to grade (and interpret) because of the different assumptions people made. On a few of your homework 2 papers, I asked you some questions. I've numbered them in purple.

If you have a grade at the top, then I had no questions. Thanks.

Next Week's Classes

Professor Singh will be taking my place next Monday, 2/25, to talk about Superscalar processors.

No class next Wednesday.

See you on Monday, March 3.

Homework 3

I posted homework 3 to Blackboard. It's due Monday, March 3.

Homework 2

I've posted Homework 2 (an exercise in scoreboarding) to Blackboard. It's due Monday, 2/18.

Homework 1

I uploaded Homework 1 to Blackboard, under the assignments category. It has problems from Chapter 1 and Appendix B.

Instruction Set Architectures (ISA)

For next time, please read Appendix B, concentrating on Sections 2 - 6.

If you don't have much exposure to this topic, I recommend skimming Appendix J.2 (on the CD) to get a feel for the wide variety of ISAs. There's also some interesting historical info (for example, Figure J.35 shows the lineage of RISC processors).

Finally, if you are interested in history, I'd recommend Appendix K. Section 2 is a history of the very earliest machines, while Section 3 is about the development of ISAs.

Move to SN155

Sorry about the crowding today. Let's meet in SN155 beginning next class (which is next Wednesday).

Why are Wafers Round?

John Thomas found this good explanation of the process for manufacturing Silicon wafers.

http://www.processpecialties.com/siliconp.htm

A picture of the cylindrical boule is at

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Image:Monokristalines_Silizium_f%C3%BCr_die_Waferherstellung.jpg