Comp 220 - Computer Organization (Spring 2015)

• Syllabus.
• Who was Clifford Nass? And what does this have to do with Computer Organization?
• Rube Goldberg? - no, it's a portion of the CPU!
• Slides in PowerPoint format from "Impacts of Moore's Law: What every CS undergraduate should know about the impacts of advancing technology." Plenary talk by Mary Jane Irwin of Penn State University at CCSCNE-07 Conference at RIT, Rochester, NY, April 21, 2007. Updated by yours truly, 2015. (Slides in OpenOffice format)

Linux Resources

Linux cheat-sheet - Linux sheet given out in class.
Linux Survival - online Linux tutorial. Quick-n-easy!
Beginners: Learn Linux
Linux is NOT Windows

Fun (?) Pictures

Photos from the Arithmeum Museum in Bonn, Germany.

• 99.9999999% pure silicon crystal
• Silicon wafers, and self portrait
• Chips on a wafer
• This IS your father's memory (magnetic core memory; 10000 bit capacity)
• So easy, a monkey can do it! (check out the text from the original instructions in upper left)
• As exciting as it gets for a mathematician

Examples/Handouts

• How to make a chip - page from Intel with animated videos showing how computer chips are made.
• SPIM - all about SPIM, right from the source (James Larus, the original author).
• SPIM Quick Reference
• figure1.16.pdf - clock rate and power over time.
• figure1.17.pdf - processor performance over time.

Projects

Not yet!

The Knob and Switch (KandS) Computer

The Knob and Switch Computer is a Web-based simulator that will introduce you to the inner workings of a CPU and memory. It is an interactive simulation that allows you to change the computer's settings and view what effect these have.

This simulation comes to us courtesy of Grant Braught of Dickinson College.

The K&S Datapath Simulation

This simulator introduces the K&S datapath. The key features are the knobs and switches that can be set to control the operands, operations and storage of the result.



The K&S Datapath Simulation with Main Memory

This simulator adds a main memory unit to the datapath to increase the storage capacity of the machine. The key features are that memory accesses require more time than register accesses, and that memory and ALU operations happen in parallel even though one of them will be ignored.



The K&S with Microprogramming

This simulator makes the K&S programmable by adding a microprogram store. The concept of microprogramming is intuitive in that the bits of each microprogram simply encode the positions of the knobs and switches.



The Complete K&S Model 1 Computer

This simulator is a complete stored program computer. It uses a control unit that translates machine language commands into the microinstructions that carry out the operation. Instructions entered in main memory locations in assembly language are automatically assembled into machine language. The assembly / machine language instructions are documented on the: Assembly/Machine Language Programming Card.