Pre-Lecture Prep

Please spend one hour working on the readings posted in the zyBook section "Introduction to Processors" before the next class. Complete the participation activities as you go. If you aren't done after an hour, feel free to stop where you are (as long as I've seen you've made an effort, you'll get credit for participation). Sections marked "optional" will be covered during lecture or are there for your reference.

Announcements

• Office hours: by appointment (email me if none of those times work)
  • The goal of this is to be more flexible / have more times, but I'm also open to a regularly scheduled time! Feel free to come as a group.
• Homework 1 will due in one week

Learning Objectives and Outcomes

In this lecture, you will...

• review the different types of computers, and the design constraints and metrics of performance for each
• list as many of the 8 great ideas of computer architecture as you can
• complete exercises evaluating processor performance and power
• benchmarking

By the end of this lecture, you should be able to...

• articulate several of the great ideas of computer architecture, and discuss how they are relevant to processor performance
• compare the performance or power utilization of two processors for a given task
• evaluate the performance of a processor using SPEC CPU Benchmarks

In Class Work

Introduction to Computers

Welcome! Hope everyone had a nice weekend.

Let's start by listing the three different types of computers, and consider the different aspects of these computers that are important and which might constraint our designs:

1. server