Things to Know for the Midterm
CS 641 Lecture, Dr. Lawlor
Know how these things work, when they're useful, and how they interrelate!
- How to build logic gates from FET transistors
- How to build a simple in-order CPU from logic gates
- How CISC and RISC machines encode instructions
- How pipelining, branch prediction, superscalar, out of order execution, and register renaming work (down to the circuit level)
- How SIMD, SMT, and SMP parallelism interrelate
- How floating point numbers are represented, and why you care
- How real SIMD instruction sets work:
- x86 SSE instructions (_mm_add_ps, _mm_movemask_ps, etc)
- ARM VFP instructions (LEN field, fadd, fldmias, etc)
- GPU PTX instructions (kernels, global, shared, etc)
- Branching in SIMD (compute both sides, and mask out the right answer)
You're responsible for everything listed in the lecture notes.