Final Class ECE 472 Midterm 2 due today

What you learned in 10 weeks • What is computer architecture – What technology/system

• How to improve performance – Increase clock frequency – Increase pipelining –

• Multi-core / parallelism – Parallelism is the way industry is moving –

Practical • Verilog – how to use verilog to simulate logic design – Intel,

Final Words • No Free Lunch – EE: making multi-cores is ‘simple’; making them

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Final Class, ECE 472 • Midterm #2 due today – 1 -5% extra credit for written report of Dally’s video • Oral presentation of class project: today • Graduate students: SDK example of running CUDA • Undergraduate: extra credit (up to 1 whole class grade) for attempting CUDA on something • Five points on FINAL-PROJECT for turning in the class evaluation • Synthesized CPU: all of you will ‘see’ your final design in *real* silicon – 1 Million gates

What you learned in 10 weeks • What is computer architecture – What technology/system constraints affect future computer design • Software; memory; hazards; computation; locality • Tradeoffs in instructions sets (MIPS; ARM; Intel) • How to estimate performance – Execution time – Power consumption (static / dynamic)

• How to improve performance – Increase clock frequency – Increase pipelining – Increase parallelism • How to improve power – Go parallel – Low VDD operation – Power/clock gating • Caching – Idea of memory hierarchy – Memories designed for capacity; NOT SPEED

• Multi-core / parallelism – Parallelism is the way industry is moving – ILP (instruction-level parallelism) is limited – Hardware parallelism by itself is limited – Explicit exposure to software to take advantage • Hardware can’t know what to parallelize • Hardware spends a lot of energy to parallelize

Practical • Verilog – how to use verilog to simulate logic design – Intel, Mentor, Synopsys, Tektronix, n. Vidia, FPGA synthesis (Xilinx; Altera) • Test / Verification is DIFFICULT – 80% of the design costs for processors • Parallel Programming – how to take sequential code and convert it into parallel – CUDA is example of this

Final Words • No Free Lunch – EE: making multi-cores is ‘simple’; making them useful is different – CS: software of the future will NOT get faster, unless it is parallelized • Both performance AND power are important • Future embedded/high-end systems requires understanding of this EE/CS co-design – i. e. multi-core/GPUs within cellphones – Cloud computing (1000’s of nodes in server farm)