Advanced Computer Hardware - EEN 523

Architecture of modern computers systems including CPU, memory, pipelines, multicores and multiprocessors. The emphasis is on analyzing major system components with impact on performance such as: pipelining, instructional and thread level parallelism, I/O devices, memory hierarchy and cache, branch prediction methods, speculations for data and branch predictions. Different multithreading implementations, virtual machines, UMA, NUMA and COMA, memory architectures in shared multiprocessor and single processors, and cache coherence issues. Prerequisite: EEN 323/CSC 312.