Modern Computer Architectures

The course emphasises on theoretical aspects and practical trade-offs of computer architecture and organization of the newest microprocessors currently on the market, e.g., RISC-V, and the latest developments in computer architecture and compiler research. Quantifying design decisions in terms of performance and cost. Computer architecture subjects include: basic principles, instruction set architectures, pipelining and pipelining consequences, multiple-issue (superscalar and VLIW) processors, out-of-order execution, branch prediction, speculative execution, advanced memory hierarchies, pre-fetching, multithreaded processors and multiprocessors, energy consumption, and reliability. Compiler subjects include: an overview of different compilers, LLVM, scanners and parsers, mapping of source code into intermediate representation (IR) as well as an overview of different IRs, different code optimizations, data flow analysis and scalar optimisation, back-end compilation, instruction selection and scheduling, and register allocation.