CPSC 420/EENG 420 to be offered Spring 2024

In the spring of ‘24, I will be offering CPSC 420/EENG 420, or Computer Architecture (this will be the second time that I will be teaching this course).

If you have wanted to know what a state-of-the-art CPU from Intel, AMD, ARM, or RISC-V looks like, or you’ve wanted to know what NVIDIA’s GPUs look like, or why Google’s TPUs are designed the way that they are, this is the class for you. You will learn about the design trade-offs that go into building complex hardware, consisting of what will soon be trillions of transistors. And, through the course, you will get to build a high-performance CPU as well as do low-level profiling of a state-of-the-art Intel CPU.

The only pre-requisites to the class are either CPSC 323 or, if you are an EE major, a digital logic class. While prior exposure to operating systems and compilers is helpful, it is not necessary. And, although you will write code in a hardware description language (i.e., Verilog), you do not need prior exposure to it.

The course will consist of lectures and programming assignments. There will be no exams as this is a programming-intensive course. Programming assignments will be done in pairs, although I reserve the right to change this policy depending on enrollment numbers.

Please sign up; for those of you who have taken CPSC 323, you know that I really enjoy teaching you about low-level computer stuff. I hope to see you in the spring!