The purpose of this assignment is to investigate a current CPU design and describe it to the class. You will have 30-40 minutes for a presentation and need to hand out a 2-5 page white paper. For motivation, assume that each person in the class has a specific computational problem and needs information about each of these CPUs to make a purchasing decision.

• look for independent sources of information/evaluation
• include your estimate of the quality of any information (if uncertain)
• if possible, try and run benchmarks, cache tests (pg 477), etc, to verify information
• technical information for processor family
  • range CPU speeds available? future speeds? how does it map to actual performance?
  • number of registers? number of functional units?
  • RAM available - what can the CPU support? the cache support?
  • number of pipeline stages? what does each do?
  • number of caches on-chip? off-chip? what are the hit and miss penalties?
  • describe the overall memory hierarchy. what does it do well? what doesn't it do well?
  • any vector/multiprocessing capabilities?
  • what type of ILP supported? branch prediction? dynamic loop unrolling? etc..

This list is not all-inclusive - provide any information that would further our understanding of the CPU design. In particular, provide URLs and other pointers to your sources so we can follow-up or explore further.

Grading will be based on correctness, completeness, quality of the oral presentation, quality of the white paper, and ranking of the four presentations.

Date	Student	Topic
12/07	Intel Pentium	Dan Cardin
12/07	Athlon	Gabe Emerson
12/09	PowerPC G5	Aaron Behnen
12/09	Graphics Pipelines	Jim Chmielowski