CONCORDIA UNIVERSITY
Department of Electrical & Computer Engineering

COEN6741 - Computer Architecture & Design
Winter 2018


Instructor: Dr. S. Tahar Lectures: Office Hour: Mondays  -- 13:30-14:30

Course Objectives: Hardware design issues of high performance computer architectures.

Prerequisites: Basic knowledge in Computer organization, Digital circuit design, High-level language programming, e.g. C or Java, and Assembly programming, e.g. Intelx86 or MC680xx. Besides, knowledge of the VHDL or Verilog HDL is required for the course project.

Textbook: "Computer Architecture: A Quantitative Approach" (6th Ed.) by John L. Hennessy and David A. Patterson, Elsevier, 2018. ISBN: 978-0128119051.

Course Outline:

  • Fundamentals of Quantitative Design & Analysis (Chapter 1)
  • Instruction Set Principals (Appendix A)
  • Instruction Pipelining (Appendix C)
  • Mamory Hierarchy Design (Appendix B & Chapter 2)
  • Instruction-Level Parallelism (Chapter 3)
  • Data-Level Parallelism (Chapter 4)
  • Thread-Level Parallelism (Chapter 5)

  • Reference Books:
    1. "Computer Organization and Design: The Hardware/Software Interface" (5th Ed.) by David A. Patterson and John L. Hennessy, Elsevier, 2013. ISBN: 978-0124077263
    2. "Computer Organization and Architecture" (10th Ed.) by William Stallings, Prentice Hall, 2015. ISBN: 978-0134101613.

    Grading Scheme: Test 1: 30%, Test 2: 30%, and Project: 40%.

    Course Web Page: http://www.ece.concordia.ca/~tahar/coen6741.html