Comp 4611

COMP4611

Computer Architecture

Lecture 1: Introduction and Basics

Dr. Pan Hui

Department of Computer Science and Engineering

The Hong Kong University of Science and Technology

Question: What Is This?

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Answer: Masterpiece of A Famous Architect

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A Key Question

• How Was Pei Able To Design BoC Tower?

• Can have many guesses

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(Ultra) hard work, perseverance, dedication (over decades)

Experience of decades

Creativity

Out-of-the-box thinking

Principled design

A good understanding of past designs

Good judgment and intuition

Strong combination of skills (math, architecture, art, …)

…

• (You will be exposed to and hopefully develop/enhance many of

these skills in this course)

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Differences Between These Two

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Major High-Level Goals of This Course

• Understand the principles

• Understand the precedents

• Based on such understanding:

• Enable you to evaluate tradeoffs of different designs and ideas

• Enable you to develop principled designs

• Enable you to develop novel, out-of-the-box designs

• The focus is on:

• Principles, precedents, and how to use them for new designs

• In Computer Architecture

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Role of the (Computer) Architect

from Yale Patt’s lecture notes

Role of The (Computer) Architect

• Look backward (to the past)

• Understand tradeoffs and designs, upsides/downsides, past workloads.

Analyze and evaluate the past.

• Look forward (to the future)

• Be the dreamer and create new designs. Listen to dreamers.

• Push the state of the art. Evaluate new design choices.

• Look up (towards problems in the computing stack)

• Understand important problems and their nature.

• Develop architectures and ideas to solve important problems.

• Look down (towards device/circuit technology)

• Understand the capabilities of the underlying technology.

• Predict and adapt to the future of technology (you are designing for N years

ahead). Enable the future...