Review of Pipelining, Examples of some pipeline in modern processors, pipeline hazards, data hazards, control
hazards. Techniques to handle hazards, performance improvement with pipelines and effect of hazards on the
performance.
Vector processors- Use and effectiveness, memory to memory vector architectures, vector register architecture, vector
length and stride issues, compiler effectiveness in vector processors.
SISD, MISD, MIMD, Single instruction multiple data stream (SIMD) architectures. Array processors, comparison with
vector processors, example of array processors such as MMX Technology.
Memory hierarchy, Cache Introduction, Techniques to reduce cache misses, techniques to reduce cache penalties,
technique to reduce cache hit times. Effect of main memory bandwidth, effect of bus-width, memory access time,
virtual memory, etc.
RISC architectures, addressing modes, instructions formats, effect of simplification on the performance, example
processors such as MIPS, PA-RISC, SPARC, Power PC, etc.
MIMID Multiprocessors, Centralized shared architectures, distributed shared memory architectures, synchronization
and memory consistency models, message passing architectures, comelier issues. Data flow architectures,
Interconnection networks.