This is a great course from Paul Kelly at Imperial College - I took it when studying there and found it fascinating, although I should have worked much harder on it.
You should have a look at the lecture notes. If the course is too advanced, you can look for its predecessor, which introduces RISC architecture very well and constitutes a strong starting point for anyone interested in this field.
PhilWright and executesorder66 comments are interesting given some things that make Hacker News without such comments. I hope the second paragraph of this article explains things a bit more:
The people that invented RISC, SPARC and MIPS namely, wrote some books teaching computer architecture that had a large effect on academia, industry, etc. This course is based on their advanced work. You get the information for free. It's in PDF form for easy reading. Great to get stuff for free that some people paid a lot of money to learn, eh?
Useful too. One just confirmed an idea my past year of HW research had about 180nm being sweet spot for open-source HW efforts: Pentium 4 was done on it albeit full-custom and with Intel level of expertise. Should be able to do plenty at that node in 2015 with application-specific designs. The 130 node required physical verification tied to synthesis but 180-350 might work with Qflow synthesis. Seeing what P4 achieved. I also have an upper bound on what eventual full-custom would likely achieve. I'm extra confident in my recommendation despite never having built an ASIC. Thanks Thomas. :)
The content of the lecture notes[1] seem good, although I don't really like the presentation that much. Also, its difficult to follow just the notes without watching or listening to the lectures. Maybe I'm just spoiled by the online education websites (Coursera, EdX, etc.) Last year I took "The Hardware/Software Interface"[2] on Coursera and it was great.
As someone who very recently took this course (around 6 months ago to be exact), his flow of lecture is jarring if you aren't paying attention (and the confusion of the slides accentuates this), but the raw content is still very very useful (revising for this exam was easier than some others).
While I'm not able to share them with you, IC also has a system of recorded lectures, which makes these even easier to follow.
Hmm. You have a point. I get a lot of what he's saying but some is certainly unclear. And, damnit, despite many good links he doesn't seem to have anything like that anywhere. (sighs) So, we have one solid critique of this page.
Should at least update it with speaker's notes. I always distributed those with my PowerPoints just in case they landed on a new audience not possessing innate, psychic abilities. I heard that happens on occasion.
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[ 7.9 ms ] story [ 49.9 ms ] threadYou should have a look at the lecture notes. If the course is too advanced, you can look for its predecessor, which introduces RISC architecture very well and constitutes a strong starting point for anyone interested in this field.
https://queue.acm.org/detail.cfm?id=1189286
The people that invented RISC, SPARC and MIPS namely, wrote some books teaching computer architecture that had a large effect on academia, industry, etc. This course is based on their advanced work. You get the information for free. It's in PDF form for easy reading. Great to get stuff for free that some people paid a lot of money to learn, eh?
Useful too. One just confirmed an idea my past year of HW research had about 180nm being sweet spot for open-source HW efforts: Pentium 4 was done on it albeit full-custom and with Intel level of expertise. Should be able to do plenty at that node in 2015 with application-specific designs. The 130 node required physical verification tied to synthesis but 180-350 might work with Qflow synthesis. Seeing what P4 achieved. I also have an upper bound on what eventual full-custom would likely achieve. I'm extra confident in my recommendation despite never having built an ASIC. Thanks Thomas. :)
[1]: Direct link to PDFs https://www.doc.ic.ac.uk/~phjk/AdvancedCompArchitecture/Lect...
[2]: Details: https://www.coursera.org/course/hwswinterface Course content: https://class.coursera.org/hwswinterface-002
While I'm not able to share them with you, IC also has a system of recorded lectures, which makes these even easier to follow.
https://www.coursera.org/course/comparch
Maybe check it out and see if you'd recommend it. A qualified opinion would help me know if I should just post it next time topic comes up.
Should at least update it with speaker's notes. I always distributed those with my PowerPoints just in case they landed on a new audience not possessing innate, psychic abilities. I heard that happens on occasion.
Like Coursera, eh? Here you go:
https://www.coursera.org/course/comparch
References same textbook. Might help you and others with similar trouble with these notes.
Not something I expected to see on HN, but hey. If you have time to peruse it, I recommend it :)