ECS154B Final Review

Final is Comprehensive.  What should you know?  Everything that you were
responsible for knowing for the midterm, plus chapters 4, 5, 7, and what was 
covered in class. If you have attended class, done the reading and the lab 
assignments, you should be in good shape.  

Final will be closed book, but you can bring along 2 pages of notes. The notes
*must* be hand-written ... as stated in class, emphasis will be on how well you
know the material, and in particular how well you can solve problems. Expect to
see problems very much like the problems in the chapters, because they are not
only illustrative but they also have answers that you can check your work on.

Review of what we have covered so far: 

Chapter 4:  Pipelining
	    What it is, why it is important
	    Impact on cycle time, performance, etc.
	    Interaction with instruction set design
	    Hazards (3 types)
		Structural, Data, Control
	    Solutions to hazards (Stall, or ...)
		replicate hardware, forwarding, delay slots, prediction, etc.
		Forwarding, all the ramifications, how it is detected, etc.
		Branch prediction, how it is done, different types, why, etc.
		(Branch target buffers, indirect branches)
	    How pipelining is implemented
	    Exceptions
	    Multiple Issue machines, renaming logic, etc.
	    OOO, scoreboarding, tomasulo, etc.

Chapter 5:  Memory Heirarchy
	    Review of Cache, memory heirarchy
	    Types of caches, where blocks can be found, etc.
	    Write Strategies (4 types)
	    Average memory access time, total equation
	    4 C's of caches
	    Fundamental cache parameters
	    Evaluating cache performance (Analytical, trace, simulation)
	    Advanced cache topics (lots of stuff here)
	    VM, concepts behind it.

Chapter 7:  Parallel processing
	    Need for parallel processing
	    Flynn classifications
	    Relationship between ILP and parallel processing
	    Difficulty with parallel processing
	    Different types of paralle processors
		Shared Address Space, non-shared (message passing)
	    Centralized, distributed memory
	    Caches in parallel processors
	    Atomicitiy
	    Consistency
	    Multithreading