CENG 5410 Advanced Computer Architecture

Version: 2026 Fall
Lecture: M15:30-18:15 Venue: ELB 401

Course Instructor: Prof. Zhengrong Wang zhengrongwang@cuhk.edu.hk

Course Tutors:
Xingyu Jiang xyjiang26@cse.cuhk.edu.hk
Yifan Guo yfguo26@cse.cuhk.edu.hk

Description

Computer architecture is the glue that binds the worlds of hardware and software. Developing new architectures is the art and science of understanding the intrinsic properties of applications, developing and interconnecting hardware components to meet cost and performance goals, and creating abstractions that enable efficient use of hardware without sacrificing generality.

Several important specific goals are:

Be able to reason about the relationship between application properties and how they are exploited by architecture/microarchitecture mechanisms.
Gain intuition and reasoning skills regarding fundamental architecture tradeoffs of hardware design choices (performance/area/power/complexity/generality).
Understand microarchitecture techniques behind extracting instruction level parallelism and mechanisms for exploiting locality.
Gain appreciation for state-of-the-art microprocessors.
Learn about evaluation methods, including simulation, analytical modeling, and mechanistic models. Specific focus on gem5/flashgpu-sim.

We use piazza for questions.

Course Requirements

Reading Reviews (30%), Midterm (30%), Final Project (40%).
A student must gain at least 50% of the full marks in order to pass the course.

References

There is no required textbook. You could refer to Synthesis Lectures and a lot of papers we are going to review in this course. If you do want a textbook, Computer Architecture: A Quantitative Approach is an excellent choice.

Lectures

Subjected to changes.

Week	Date	Reading	Review	Reference Material
1	Sep. 07	Cramming More Components Onto Integrated Circuits – Moore 65
		Power: A First-Class Architectural Design Constraint – Mudge 01
2	Sep. 14	Compiler-friendly ISAs – Wulf 81
3	Sep. 21	Synth Lec: Processor Microarchitecture (chap 1-3)	Power Struggles – Blem 13	Branch Prediction Taxonomy – Yeh 92
4	Sep. 28	Synth Lec: Processor Microarchitecture (chap 4,5)	IA-64 – Huck 00	RUU – Sohi 90
5	Oct. 05	Synth Lec: Processor Microarchitecture (chap 6,7,8)	Memory Dependence Prediction – Moshovos 97	Implementing Precise Interrupts – Smith 90
6	Oct. 12	Understanding Scheduling Replay – Kim 04	Continual Flow Pipelines – Srinivasan 04
7	Oct. 19	Haswell IEEE Micro (2014)	Alternate Path Fetch
8	Oct. 26	Synth Lec: Multi-Core Cache Hierarchies (Chap 1)		Victim Cache & Stream Buffers – Jouppi 90
9	Nov. 02	Synth Lec: Primer on Prefetching (Chap 1, 2.1-2.2, 3.1-3.2)	ZCache – Sanchez 10	Criticality-based Prefetching – Nori 18
10	Nov. 09	Virtual memory in contemporary microprocessors	Hawkeye – Jain 16	Virtual-real Cache – Wang 89
11	Nov. 16	Synth Lec: Multithreading Architecture (read ch1-5, skim 6-7)
12	Nov. 23	Synth Lec: Primer on Consistency and Cache Coherance (read ch1-3, skim 4-8)	Niagara – Kongetira 05	Victim replication – Zhang 05
13	Nov. 30		Thread-level Speculation (TLS) – Mowry 98
14	Dec. 07		NVIDIA Tesla – Lindholm 08	Hopper GPU
15	Dec. 14	MIT RAW – Waingold 97	Wavescalar – Swanson 03	Inefficiency in general-purpose chips – Hameed 10

Review / Project Report

Please submit your final project through blackboard. If the submission is late but within 5 calendar days after the deadline, there will be a deduction of 10% per day from the marks awarded for the submitted piece of work.

Important Dates

Nov. 2: In-class midterm exam.
Dec. 13: Final project due on 11:59 pm.