Pre-Midterm Course Review

• Wire up a CPU from a set of registers and ALUs.
• Design an efficient instruction set encoding, and understand how it will operate the CPU.
• RISC encodings (fixed-size), such as MIPS or PPC
  
• CISC encodings (variable-size), such as x86
• Read x86 assembly language (in Intel/Microsoft/MASM/NASM/YASM syntax, not gcc)
  
• Write and modify CPU emulators.
• Understand pipelined CPUs
• Insert FIFOs between circuitry stages
  
• Forward results between pipeline stages, bypassing register file, for performance
• Insert pipeline stalls for branches or slow instructions
  
• Understand out-of-order CPUs
• Dependencies: RAW, WAW, WAR
• Register renaming
  
• Understand superscalar CPUs
• Multiple execution units
• Branch prediction/speculation
  
• Understand floating-point numbers, including IEEE bit layout, denormals and infinities
  
• Write and read SIMD code, such as SWAR bit-hacking or SSE floating-point
• Understand high-performance code, including fighting timers
• Understand multi-threaded code, including locks and privatization