Old Assignments: EE480 Advanced Computer Architecture

This page contains links to previous assignments. Current EE480 students are free to examine these and to use that understanding to help with completing their projects, but should NOT be simply copying significant parts of these projects. If you do make use of any material here to produce your own work that strongly resembles things here, do so with appropriate citation.

Spring 2020

The following materials are from Spring 2020:

• Assignment 0: Unsigned Saturation Subtraction; here is a sample solution.
• Here's Gr8BOnd ("Great Beyond"), a processor designed to showcase Posit arithmetic, as described in John Gustafson's "Beyond Floating Point" library
• Assignment 1: Assembling The Gr8BOnd; here is a sample solution.
• Assignment 2: Multi-Cycle Gr8BOnd (integer only)
• Assignment 3: Pipelined Gr8BOnd (integer only)
• Assignment 4: Pipelined Float + Posit Gr8BOnd

Fall 2019

The following materials are from Fall 2019:

• Assignment 0: Rise Up!; here is a sample solution
• Assignment 1: AXA Encoding And Assembler
• Assignment 2: Multi-Cycle AXA
• Assignment 3: Pipelined AXA
• The last assignment was really two different assignments, depending on which team you were on. One was Reversible Pipelined AXA, the other was Transactional Memory For Pipelined AXA.

Spring 2019

The following materials are from Spring 2019:

• Assignment 0: 16-bit Absolute Value, and a sample solution
• Assignment 1: TACKY Encoding And Assembler, and a sample solution
• Assignment 2: A TACKY Multi-Cycle Implementation, and a sample solution
• Assignment 3: A TACKY Pipeline
• Assignment 4: Coherently TACKY

Fall 2018

The following materials are from Fall 2018:

• The first homework assignment and a sample solution.
• Here's PinKY, an ARM-ish 16-bit architecture used for the Fall 2018 projects.
• The second homework assignment and a sample solution: PinKY.aik
• The third homework assignment and a sample solution: multipinky.v.
• The fourth homework assignment and a poorly-tested sample solution is here.
• The fifth homework assignment.

Spring 2018

The following materials are from Spring 2018:

• The first project -- Hamming Distance Between Two 8-Bit Binary Integers... and a sample solution
• The second project -- KySMet (KentuckY Simd Machine-et) Encoding And Assembler
• A sample solution to the first exam
• KYSC (KySMet C Compiler), runs as javascript in browser
• The third project -- Multi-Cycle KySMet... and a not-well-tested sample solution
• The fourth project -- Pay It Forward?
• The fifth project -- E Pluribus Unum?

Fall 2017

The following materials are from Fall 2017:

• The first project -- Maximum Of Two 8-Bit Unsigned Binary Integers... and a sample solution.
• The second project -- Logick (a processor supporting Log Number System arithmetic) instruction set encoding and assembler.
• The third project -- Multi-Cycle Logick
• The fourth project -- Quicker Logick
• The fifth project -- Better Than Float, It's Log

Spring 2017

The following materials are from Spring 2017:

• The first project -- A Random 8-bit Circuit
• The second project -- SIK (Stacking In Kentucky) instruction set encoding and assembler.
• The third project -- A SIK Little Machine
• The fourth project -- A SIK Pipeline
• The fifth project -- Caching In

Fall 2016

The following materials are from Fall 2016, Hem tlhIngan jInmol!

• The first project -- Average Two 8-Bit Unsigned Binary Integers
• The second project -- loQ Don encoding and assembler
• LDCC (loQ Don C Compiler) -- a fragile... no, broken... compiler for a subset of C, as full C source code.
• The third project -- chenmoH loQ Don Qapla'!
• The fourth project -- Saghmo' loj rIntaH chenmoH!
• The fifth project -- nItebHa', Doch cha'.

Spring 2016

The following materials are from Spring 2016:

• The first project -- A Smarter MIPS Assembler
• The second project -- 8-bit Signed Saturation Adder
  Here is my sample solution in Verilog; the sample Implementor's Notes that go with it are this Latex source file which becomes this PDF.
• IDIOCC (IDIOT C Compiler) is here as full C source code. No float support in this, however.
• The third project -- The Making Of An IDIOT
• The fourth project -- A Faster IDIOT
• The fifth project -- Floating

Other Old Refs...

We are not expecting to stick very close to the textbook, but it is a very good book to have as a reference, and we discussed a few key "theory" ideas from it that were not discussed in EE380. For that, there are the book-oriented sildes: Memory Systems, Instruction-Level Parallelism (really my slides on Better Pipeline Management), Data Parallelism, and Warehouse-Scale Computers. Yes, we placed a heavy emphasis on ILP and less so on Memory Systems... almost nothing on the other two.