Welcome to the encore offering of Computer
Architecture. I'm David Wentzlaff, I'm a professor at the Princeton Department of Electrical
Engineering. And my background is building mini core
and multi core microprocessors both in
academia and in industry. And for example, this is one of the microprocessors that I built while I was
in industry. And this is actually a 64 core multi-core
microprocessor. And that's actually put onto something
like this board here. And you can see actually that that chip is
under this heat sink on this board here. And in this course, you're going to be
learning how to build processors with, sort of complexity
on the order of this. We're not, in this course, trying to teach
you how to build basic processors. We will overview basic processors and
basic in order pipeline processors, but instead, in this course, we'll go into
much more detail about how to build out of order sequential processors, how do you build more advanced things, like
advanced caches? How do you go about building vector
processors? How do you exploit different types of parallelism, like instructional
parallelism? Thread level parallelism? Process level parallelism?
Vector parallelism, etc.? We'll also be going into detail about how
to build cache coherent systems. And at the end of the course, we'll be talking about how to build multi-core and
many-core microprocessors. And I wanted to point out that this course
is an advanced computer architecture course, so we'll be going into much more
detail, and we're going to be learning how to build the inner working components, for instance all the different structures
and all the different algorithms you need in order to build these advanced modern-day
microprocessors. And we won't be spending as much time
looking at how to build processors let's say from 20
or 30 years ago. So in this on core offering, we're
going to be extending where we were for our first
offering. And in our first offering we had over
100,000 students registered. And this was really successful. We were very encouraged by this. And we want this offering to be just as
successful. So please, tell your friends. If you're sitting here at the beginning of
this class, watching this video, and saying I know of a friend who might
actually be helped by this course. Let them know. If they're interested in the field, let
them know. Also if you're taking a computer
architecture course at another university, and you
want to use a supplemental materials, please sign
up and tell your friends to sign up. We try to make this course also useful for people who are currently taking a course
at other Universities. So let's stop and take a look at the
philosophy of this course. So in this course we're trying to have a
high quality course similar to what we have at Princeton. And this course is going to be rigorous,
so we're going to use good text books, have hard problems, have a
hard mid-term and a hard final. Now the trade-off here is that because
this course is going to be so rigorous you're going to learn a lot
and it's going to be very rewarding. But unlike, you know, other courses where
it might just be a survey level course, this is going to go into the details, and the trade off there is you're going to learn
and be able to apply this information in the
future of your life. I wanted to, while we were talking about
rigor and sort of what goes about into a course, I want to talk about the
two recommended textbooks for this course. So the first recommended textbook is this
one here. It's called Patterson and Hennessy. you see that the two authors are Patterson
and Hennessey and the title of the book is Computer
Architecture A Quantitative Approach. We're going to be using the fifth edition
of this book, but for those of you who, and I highly
recommend the fifth edition. But for those of you who are not able to
acquire the fifth edition or it's too expensive you're
going, you can also go about and try to get the fourth edition of
the book, which has we'll, we'll be posting equivalent
pages out of the fourth edition. If they are valuable. So there's some topics which are covered
only in the fifth edition, but not in the fourth
edition. also I wanted to say we will also be
posting if there's a particular question that we
assign from a textbook. We'll be paraphrasing or, or copying the
entire question on there. We've had permission from the publisher to
do that. The second book for this course we're
going to be using is called Modern Processor Design
Fundamentals of Super-scalar Processors. And we'll be talking about this as or we'll be mentioning this and we coined
this Shennon-Leposty book because these are the two authors of
this textbook. I did want to point out that this version
here which has a blue cover and is hardcover
has recently fallen out of print as McGraw-Hill, who is the
publisher, but it is being reissued by Wyvern Press in a
cheaper, paperback edition. the paperback edition is going to have the
white cover and will be released very soon and we'll post more details about
that on the course website when it becomes
available. For those of you who are joining in the
middle of this course, we want to encourage you to,
to jump right in. the mid term and the final we will have
open for long periods to take the exams and also to
grade the exams. But if you are just coming in the middle
and you're like say joining like a week before
the midterm or after the midterm we'll be posting the
answers to those but we unfortunately can't have like
infinite numbers of midterms and finals with full grading turned on. So you're more than welcome to come join
the course. Use it as a self study. And we'll also be including after the
course completes, we'll be leaving it open for
self study. And for instance if you missed the midterm
but you make it to this course for the final feel free to
take the final. so, while this is the encore offering of
the course, I wanted to talk a little bit about how
we've improved this course since the first offering. So, we'll actually we've re-taped several
of the lectures, and we've fixed many different errata in
the slides. And while I was speaking about errata, I
wanted to encourage you if you find an error, somewhere in the course
material, please log in and use the course forums. Go to the course material errors forum,
and look through and see, make sure that the error has not
already been posted. But if it hasn't, please let us know. We really want to try to make this as best
as possible, this course. So please go in there and post the
problems, and we'll try to get 'em fixed as soon as
possible. while I'm on the topic of forums, I also
wanted to talk about, language and region specific
meet up groups, or study groups. We have a location on our forums where
people can meet up and try to post in there if they are from a
specific region or specific language. I unfortunately only speak English. So I'm not going to be able to answer your
questions in another language. But, your fellow students might be able to
help. And it might actually help if you will,
you know, are able to discuss the different problems in the
course, in a different, language. So, look onto that website. and look under the forum in that specific,
sub portion of the forum to post and try to form meet up
groups. In our first offering, we actually had.
Several, actually, physical meet up groups in different
countries. And we had language specific discussions
that were quite in depth about problems, of this
course. And it, from what we've heard, it really help different, students from
around the world. Also, one of the things I wanted to talk
about is surveys. And this is a difference from our first
time, offering this course. This time around, we're actually going to
be sending you surveys. and at a regular basis. So we want to be in the course we want to
probably work for the mid term one right after the mid term
and a couple at the end. And these of course are optional you don't
have to go and fill these out. But what we're trying to do is we're
trying to understand where the students who are taking our
course are coming from. Both in location but also background and
preparation. And one of the reasons we're doing this is
to better tune the course for the future. And make the course much better in the
future. But also, we're trying to research, and actively
figure out how to better teach computer architecture
in the future. And also just about how to teach in a massively open online course environment
better in the future. Finally, I wanted to talk about. Princeton Electrical Engineering
Department. And all the very strong computer
engineering and computer architecture faculty members at
Princeton electrical engineering. So if you're going and taking this course,
and you're really enjoying the course. And you're learning. And you're, you say, I want to continue
doing this in the future. And if you're, for instance, a senior in
undergraduate. Please apply to Princeton Electrical
Engineering. Come and, learn. And figure out how to build better and
better microprocessors in the future. We currently have, five faculty member. Both in the electrical engineering department, and the computer science
department. Who focus on, computer architecture. So we have.
Tens of graduate students and also, as I said, five computer
architecture faculties and computer engineering is
located in the electrical engineering department, so
please come and apply to the electrical engineering
department. We also have circuits professors and a
bunch of software professors over in the computer science department, and we
are a top ranked school. Our submission deadline for application
process is December 15th. Thank you, and I look forward to having a
very successful course with you.