COMPUTER ORGANIZATION AND DESIGN 5th

Edition
The Hardware/Software Interface

Chapter 1
Computer Organization
and Architecture
Overview
 §1.1 Introduction
The Computer Revolution
 Progress in computer technology
 Underpinned by Moore’s Law
 Makes novel applications feasible
 Computers in automobiles
 Cell phones
 Human genome project (analyze human DNA)
 World Wide Web
 Search Engines
 Computers are pervasive

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Classes of Computers
 Personal computers
 General purpose, variety of software
 Subject to cost/performance tradeoff

 Server computers
 Network based
 High capacity, performance, reliability
 Range from small servers to building sized

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Classes of Computers
 Supercomputers
 High-end scientific and engineering calculations
 Highest capability but represent a small fraction of the overall
computer market

 Embedded computers
 Hidden as components of systems
 Stringent power/performance/cost constraints

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The PostPC Era
 Personal Mobile Device (PMD)
 Battery operated
 Connects to the Internet
 Hundreds of dollars
 Smart phones, tablets, electronic glasses
 Cloud computing
 Warehouse Scale Computers (WSC)
 Software as a Service (SaaS)
 Portion of software run on a PMD and a
portion run in the Cloud
 Amazon and Google
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What You Will Learn
 How programs are translated into the machine language
 And how the hardware executes them
 The hardware/software interface
 What determines program performance
 And how it can be improved
 How hardware designers improve performance
 What is parallel processing

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Understanding Performance
 Algorithm
 Determines number of operations executed
 Programming language, compiler, architecture
 Determine number of machine instructions executed per operation
 Processor and memory system
 Determine how fast instructions are executed
 I/O system (including OS)
 Determines how fast I/O operations are executed

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 §1.2 Eight Great Ideas in Computer Architecture
Eight Great Ideas
 Design for Moore’s Law

 Use abstraction to simplify design

 Make the common case fast

 Performance via parallelism

 Performance via pipelining

 Performance via prediction

 Hierarchy of memories

 Dependability via redundancy

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Eight Great Ideas
 Design for Moore’s Law
 integrated circuit resources double every 18–24 months

 computer architects must anticipate where the technology will be

when the design finishes rather than design for where it starts.

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Eight Great Ideas
 Use abstraction to simplify design
 Both computer architects and programmers had to invent techniques to
make themselves more productive.

 Abstractions is a major productivity technique for hardware and

software is to use to represent the design at different levels of
representation.

 lower-level details are hidden to offer a simpler model at higher levels.

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Eight Great Ideas
 Make the common case fast
 The common case is often simpler than the rare case and hence
is often easier to enhance.

 This common sense advice implies that you know what the
common case is, which is only possible with careful
experimentation and measurement.

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Eight Great Ideas
 Performance via parallelism
 computer architects have offered designs that get more performance by
performing operations in parallel

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Eight Great Ideas
 Performance via pipelining
 A particular pattern of parallelism is so prevalent in computer
architecture

 A way of speeding up execution of instructions

 Key idea: overlap execution of multiple instructions

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Eight Great Ideas
 Performance via prediction
 In some cases it can be faster on average to guess and start
working rather than wait until you know for sure, assuming that the
mechanism to recover from a misprediction is not too expensive
and your prediction is relatively accurate.

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Eight Great Ideas
 Hierarchy of memories
 Programmers want memory to be fast, large, and cheap.

 There are conflicting demands to memory speed, capacity, cost

 Hierarchy of memories, with the fastest, smallest, and most

expensive memory per bit at the top of the hierarchy and the
slowest, largest, and cheapest per bit at the bottom.

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Eight Great Ideas
 Dependability via redundancy
 Computers not only need to be fast; they need to be
dependable.

 Since any physical device can fail, we make systems

dependable by including redundant components

 These extra components can take over when a failure

occurs and to help detect failures.

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 §1.3 Below Your Program
Below Your Program
 Application software
 Written in high-level language
 System software
 Compiler: translates HLL code to
machine code
 Operating System: service code
 Handling input/output
 Managing memory and storage
 Scheduling tasks & sharing resources
 Hardware
 Processor, memory, I/O controllers

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Levels of Program Code
 High-level language
 Level of abstraction closer
to problem domain
 Provides for productivity
and portability
 Assembly language
 Textual representation of
instructions
 Hardware representation
 Binary digits (bits)
 Encoded instructions and
data

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Components of a Computer
The BIG Picture  Same components for
all kinds of computer
Input  Desktop, server,
embedded

Output
 Input/output includes
Processor  User-interface devices
Control
 Display, keyboard, mouse
Memory
1001010010110000  Storage devices
0010100101010001
1111011101100110
1001010010110000
 Hard disk, CD/DVD, flash
Datapath 1001010010110000
1001010010110000  Network adapters
 For communicating with
other computers

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Touchscreen
 PostPC device
 Supersedes keyboard
and mouse
 Resistive and
Capacitive types
 Most tablets, smart
phones use capacitive
 Capacitive allows
multiple touches
simultaneously

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Memory
 Dynamic Random Access Memory (DRAM)
 The choice for main memory
 Volatile (contents go away when power is lost)
 Fast
 Relatively small
 DRAM capacity: 2x / 2 years (since ‘96);
 Static Random Access Memory (SRAM)
 The choice for cache
 Much faster than DRAM, but less dense and more costly

 Magnetic disks
 The choice for secondary memory
 Non-volatile
 Slower
 Relatively large
 Capacity: 2x / 1 year (since ‘97)
 Solid state (Flash) memory
 The choice for embedded computers
 Non-volatile
 Optical disk (CDROM, DVD)
Inside the Processor (CPU)
 Datapath: performs operations on data
 Control: sequences datapath, memory, ...
 Cache memory
 Small fast SRAM memory for immediate access to data

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Abstractions
The BIG Picture

 Abstraction helps us deal with complexity

 Hide lower-level detail
 Instruction set architecture (ISA)
 The hardware/software interface
 Application binary interface
 The ISA plus system software interface
 Implementation
 The details underlying and interface
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Networks
 Communication, resource sharing,
nonlocal access
 Local area network (LAN): Ethernet
 Wide area network (WAN): the Internet
 Wireless network: WiFi, Bluetooth

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 §1.5 Technologies for Building Processors and Memory
Technology Trends
 Electronics
technology
continues to evolve
 Increased capacity
and performance
 Reduced cost
DRAM capacity

Year Technology Relative performance/cost

1951 Vacuum tube 1
1965 Transistor 35
1975 Integrated circuit (IC) 900
1995 Very large scale IC (VLSI) 2,400,000
2013 Ultra large scale IC 250,000,000,000

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Semiconductor Technology
 Silicon: semiconductor
 With a special chemical process, it is possible to add
materials to silicon that allow tiny areas to transform into
one of three devices:
 Conductors
 Insulators
 Switch

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Manufacturing ICs

 Yield: proportion of working dies per wafer

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Intel Core i7 Wafer

 300mm wafer, 280 chips, 32nm technology

 Each chip is 20.7 x 10.5 mm
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What is “Computer Architecture” ?
 Computer Architecture =

Instruction Set Architecture + Computer Organization

• Instruction Set Architecture (ISA)
– WHAT the computer does (logical view)
• Computer Organization
– HOW the ISA is implemented (physical view)

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 The Instruction Set:
a Critical Interface

software

instruction set

hardware

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What is Computer Architecture?
Better (More Detailed) Answer

Application
Operating
System
Compiler Firmware
Instruction Set
Architecture
Instars. Set Proc.I/O system
Datapath & Control

Digital Design
Circuit Design
Layout

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Instruction Set Architecture
 A very important abstraction:
 interface between hardware and low-level software
 standardizes instructions, machine language bit patterns, etc.
 advantage: allows different implementations of the same architecture
 disadvantage: sometimes prevents adding new innovations

 Modern instruction set architectures:

 80x86/Pentium/K6, PowerPC, DEC Alpha, MIPS, SPARC, HP

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 §1.9 Concluding Remarks
Concluding Remarks
 Cost/performance is improving
 Due to underlying technology development
 Hierarchical layers of abstraction
 In both hardware and software
 Instruction set architecture
 The hardware/software interface

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