EE 361L Lab 4: CPU Reports

September 24, 2004

Objectives

Students will work in groups of 2 and do research on a CPU architecture (if there are an odd number of students in a section, the TA can form a group of 3). Some example architectures are

MIPS R16000
ALPHA EV68
Sun UltraSPARC IV
Power PC G5
MC 68000 (Processor designed by Motorola and which was the CPU in the first MacIntosh Computer)
Intel Pentium 4
Intel Pentium Xeon
ARM Processor
PIC Processor
Cell processor for Playstation 3

You can find other processors in the survey "Great Microprocessors of the Past and Present," that can be found at the web site

http://www.sasktelwebsite.net/jbayko/cpu.html

Here's a web site that has the history of computers starting from 300 B.C.

http://www.computerhope.com/history/

Each group does an oral and written reports about their architectures. The reports should contain information on the following topics:

Technology (brief)
Architecture (includes instruction set architecture)
Pipeline structure. This is discussed in Chapter 6 of the textbook.

Implementation. (Includes topics like superscalar, scoreboarding, out of order execution, etc.)
Branch hardware

Memory (main and virtual)

Cache

The TA will present a brief tutorial on computer architecture to familiarize students with many of the concepts. However, it is expected that students may run across some concepts they have not seen before even after the tutorial.

You can also find tutorials on the web. Here are a few that I found:

Assignment

Written Report: The written report should include a description of the number of pages each student contributed. The group will get a chance to revise their reports after it has been marked once by the TA and or instructor.
Oral Report: The oral report will be around 10 minutes per student. Students should deliver their presentations using Powerpoint. It will be done in Holmes 451 and a computer projector will be available.

Grading

Writing style will account for 50% of the grade, oral presentation style will account for 25% of the grade, and content will account for 25% of the grade. Note that the heavy weight of writing style is to insure that the course meets the hallmarks of a writing-intensive class.