CS61C, Spring 2006: Important Topics for Midterm 3
- Concept and pros/cons of pipelining
- Application to single-cycle MIPS CPU
- Types of hazards
- Techniques for coping with hazards
- Branch delay slots, forwarding, load delay / interlocking
- Running programs on a pipelined processor
- Concept and principles of memory hierarchy
- Purpose of caches
- Cache organizations
- Direct Map, Set-Associative, and Fully Associative
- Pros/cons of each cache organization
- Relationship between memory address fields and cache organization
- Cache replacement- & write-back-policies
- Average memory-access-time calculation
- Concept of VM as part of memory hierarchy
- Purposes of VM
- Implementation and operation of VM (page tables, TLBs)
- Page fault
- Basics of LANs
- packetization, headers
- host computer connection to LAN
- Basic operation of switches and routers
- Principle of protocol stacks
- Objectives and high-level operation of TCP/IP
- Computer worms - how they spread and infect machines
- Mechanical structure and organization
- Data access latency calculations
- Trends in disk drives
- State-of-the-art disk specifications
- Design decisions
- Features versus MIPS ISA
- Basic concept of temporal vs spatial computing
- Basic operation of a FPGA
- Basic language syntax and program constructs
- Programming with pointers, arrays, strings, and structs
- MIPS instruction set architecture
- Branching and looping
- Procedure call/return
- Branch delay slots
- Relationship between MIPS assembly language and MIPS machine
language instruction formats
- Representation of digital signals as waveforms
- Concept of propagation delay through circuit elements
- Operation of flip-flops/registers
- basics of edge-triggering, setup time, clock-to-q delay
- Combining registers with CL and register transfer operations
- Pipelining of CL
- FSMs as SDSs
- Step by step design procedure
- Structure of datapath and relationship to instruction execution
- Concept and analysis of critical path
- Controller design
- Determination of controller table of operations, equations and circuits.