Introduction
Notes
- Computer architecture: The components of computer design that are mostly visible to the programmer
- The instruction set: ISA
- Number of registers
- Addressing modes
- Computer Organization: The low level components
- What is a register and how does it work?
- How is memory implemented?
We have studied mostly organization in L&S Theory
We have studied instructions (AN ISA) in Assembly
This semester we will study why an ISA is set up the way it is and what decisions went into this.
This is a cool topic!
Your authors have provided a fairly readable book.
In the introduction they introduce Moore's Law:
- Gordon Moore, was director of R&D at Fairchild Semiconductor
- Google it.
- In the end, from 1965 until now (or recently), it has held up
- "Every n years, the number of transistors in a chip will double"
- Originally n = 1
- Later n = 2
- This is an observation and marketing promise.
- We will discuss reasons that
- This means the speed will double
- Why speed doubling sort of fell apart
- And why this lead to multicore
- Do the riding a bike example
- Read the paragraph on page 3.
H&P define "Traditional Classes of Computers"
- Personal Computers: about 35 years old.
- Servers: Much harder to define as hardware
- At one point minis and mainframes
- Now all over the place
- Supercomputers: large parallel computers
- Look for bridges II at PSC
- https://www.psc.edu/resources/bridges-2/
- 7742 CPUs (64 cores each)
- Depending on the node, 256GB to 4TB main memory
- 192 or 80 GPUs (depending on configuration)
- Embedded devices
- On page 7 they show the growth of computer type use over the years.
- A note: On the margins of the book are a large number of useful nuggets of information. Don't ignore them.
One of the main points of interest is program performance.
- They list four things that impact performance of a program
- The algorithm: Not our problem in this class.
- The programming language, compiler and computer architecture, we discuss this
- The architecture drives the other two somewhat or completely.
- Processor and memory of the computer
- I/O System (hardware and software)
- We will discuss the last three in some detail this semester.
Generations
- (1.5) Related to Moore's law somewhat
- We have had an identified 5 generations of computing
- 1952, Vacuum Tubes: assign this as the base unit
- 1965, Transistors: 35 times "better"
- 1975, Integrated circuits: 900 times "better"
- Originally dozens of transistors on a chip
- Large Scale Integration: up to 20,000 transistors on a chip
- 1995, Very Large Scale Integration: 2,400,000 times better. 20,000 to 1,000,000 transistors
- 2013 Ultra Large scale integration, 1.5x1011 times better.
- This is from a table on page 25 in the book.
- There is an interesting discussion in the book on the manufacturing of chips.