Review of Basic Organization and Architectural Techniques

• RISC processors

• Characteristics of RISC processors

• RISC Vs CISC

• Classification of Instruction Set Architectures

• Review of performance measurements

• Basic parallel processing techniques: instruction level, thread level and
  process level

• Classification of parallel architectures

Instruction Level Parallelism

• Basic concepts of pipelining

• Arithmetic pipelines

• Instruction pipelines

• Hazards in a pipeline: structural, data, and control hazards

• Overview of hazard resolution techniques

• Dynamic instruction scheduling

• Branch prediction techniques

• Instruction-level parallelism using software approaches

• Superscalar techniques

• Speculative execution

• Review of modern processors /*The objective is to explain how ILP
  techniques have been deployed in modern processors*/

1. Pentium Processor: IA 32 and P6 microarchitectures

2. ARM Processor

Memory Hierarchies

• Basic concept of hierarchical memory organization

• Main memories

• Cache memory design and implementation

• Virtual memory design and implementation

• Secondary memory technology

• RAID

Peripheral Devices

• Bus structures and standards

• Synchronous and asynchronous buses

• Types and uses of storage devices

• Interfacing I/O to the rest of the system

• Reliability and availability

• I/O system design

• Platform architecture

Thread Level Parallelism

• Centralized vs. distributed shared memory

• Interconnection topologies

• Multiprocessor architecture

• Symmetric multiprocessors

• Cache coherence problem

• Synchronization

• Memory consistency

• Multicore architecture

• Review of modern multiprocessors

Process Level Parallelism

• Distributed computers

• Clusters

• Grid

• Mainframe computers