Advanced Computer Architecture

CEN 521
This course focuses on advanced architecture topics for systems such as personal computers, servers, and embedded or portable devices. It covers topics such as cache hierarchies, memory systems, pipelining, clusters and multiprocessors, and low power design. At the completion of the course, you will understand basic principles such as locality, coarse-grain parallelism, overlapping communication and computation, performance/power trade-offs, and reliability. Overall, you will understand how computer systems are organized and, more importantly, why they are organized that way. CEN521 discusses the characteristics of modern processors that affect system architecture, but does not provide detailed coverage of their internal micro-architecture. The prerequisite course is CEN316 or equivalent.