WELCOME TO INTRODUCTION TO COMPUTER ORGANIZATION.

This class studies the basic components of computers and how to control them at a low level. You can zoom ahead to the facts, the assignments, the quizzes, the labs, the syllabus, or the mechanics.

Who, what, and where:

• Instructor: Tracy Larrabee
  • Office: 323 Applied Sciences
  • Phone: X9-3476
  • Office hours: MW 1:00-2:00 and by appointment via email.
• Texts
  • Required: A Programmer's View of Computer Architecture by James Goodman and Karen Miller, which has a few errors.
• Class meetings
  • lecture location: JEB 152
  • lecture time: MWF 3:30-4:40 pm
• Teaching Assistants:
  • Joyopriya Bakshi: responsible for quiz grading. Office hours: Monday 1-2 and Tuesday 4-5 (Jack's Lounge)
  • Stuart Norton: responsible for discussion sections.
    Discussion hours: Thursday 3-4 and Friday 11-12 (Jack's Lounge)
• Lab Sections:
• Final Exam time: Tuesday, June 4, 4:00-7:00 pm
• Newsgroup
  • There is a newsgroup ( ucsc.class.cmpe12c) for the class. The first message of the quarter for our class was numbered 4749 on our server. Feel free to "catch up" on all the previous postings.
  • For posting to the newsgroup, it is generally better to be working from a UNIX machine (or commercial internet provider), so that proper mailing addresses are generated. One of our students wrote a nice note about how to access our newsgroup from off campus.

What we are addressing

• Week 1
  • March 27: Read Chapter 1. Think about problems 1.7, 1.8, 1.9. Be comfortable with the Instruction Fetch-Execute cycle.
  • March 29: More Instruction Fetch-Execute cycle.
• Week 2
  • April 1: Read Chapter 2, but realize that we really want to use MAL, and we will just be hanging on until we get to Chapter 8, when MAL is officially introduced. MAL has different memory accessing syntax and different addressing modes (in SAL you can address memory, but in MAL, you can only have one memory access per instruction). In class we will go through basic MAL, and you will use MAL in lab. Answer questions 2.1, 2.2, 2.5, and 2.12, but answer the questions for MAL and not SAL.
  • April 3: More Basic MAL, with control structures and I/O. Check out the table of MAL commands in Appendix B.
  • April 5: Read Chapter 3. Look at problems 3.4, 3.5, 3.7, 3.12, and 3.13.
• Week 3
  • April 8: Read Chapter 4. Look at problems 4.2, 4.3, 4.5, 4.6, 4.7
  • April 10: More on data representation: 1's complement, 2's complement, excess (or biased) notation and ascii.
  • April 12: Read Chapter 5. Look at problems 5.6, 5.7, 5.8, 5.10
• Week 4
  • April 15: Review of some representation and more on bitwise operations. Look at problems 5.1, 5.13, 5.14
  • April 17: Read Chapter 6. Look at problems 6.9, 6.10, 6.11
  • April 19: Look at problems 6.1-6.5. Read Chapter 7.
• Week 5
  • April 22: Look at problems 7.1, 7.2. Get concepts of Big and Little Endian straight.
  • April 24: More on data structures (arrays, stacks, queues). Look at problems 7.4, 7.5, 7.9, 7.10, 7.14 (but do MAL instead of SAL)
  • April 26: Read Chapter 8. Look at problems 8.1, 8.3, 8.6
• Week 6
  • April 29: Finish Chapter 8. Look at problems 8.7, 8.8, 8.9. Read Chapter 9. Look at problems 9.1, 9.2, 9.3, 9.4.
  • May 1: More on Chapter 9: MIPS Calling Conventeions. Look at problems 9.5, 9.8, 9.9
  • May 3: Guest Lecture on the Kestrel System
• Week 7
  • May 6: Guest Lecture on HC 11
  • May 8: Review of MIPS calling conventions
  • May 10: Class cancelled
• Week 8
  • May 13: Chapter 10. Look at problems 10.1, 10.2, 10.3
  • May 15: More on Chapter 10. Look at problems 10.4, 10.5, 10.6, 10.7, 10.9, 10.17
  • May 17: Chapter 11. Look at 11.1, 11.2, 11.4, 11.5, 11.13
• Week 9
  • May 20: Chapter 12. Look at problems 12.1, 12.2, 12.5, 12.7, 12.10

Daily quiz solutions

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The laboratory assignments for the course.

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What we are going to look at.

Below is the expected syllabus for this course to give you an idea of which topics will be discussed when. We may deviate a bit from this depending on class feedback. All the chapters mentioned come from our Goodman & Miller course textbook.

• Week 1: Intro to Abstraction
• Week 2: basic MAL
• Week 3: number systems (Chapters 3 & 4)
• Week 4: ALU operation (Chapters 4 & 5) and Floating Point (Chapter 6)
• Week 5: Array, Stack, Queues (Chapter 7)
• Week 6: Registers, MAL (Chapter 8)
• Week 7: Procedures, HC11 (Chapter 9)
• Week 8: More procedures (Chapter 9)
• Week 9: Assembler mechanics, TAL (Chapter 10)
• Week 10: Architecture and Interrupts(Chapters 13 & 12)

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The way the class works.

There are no required homework sets, but there will be a quiz every day, and no makeup quizzes will be given. Sure, everyone will miss a class or two, but you will have to hope that you don't miss enough to drag you down too much. No makeup quizzes will be allowed, but you get to drop the lowest three quiz scores (if you have a serious medical problem, we can talk, but make sure you have that health center note in hand). There will be one lab assignment a week, and the lab reports will be submitted electronically using the CATS submit commands. You will need to have passing quizzes, lab assignments, and final exam to pass the course. For those opting for a letter grade: the quizzes will count 30% of your grade, the labs 30%, and the final 40% (If you previously passed CE12L while failing CE12C--which is the only way you can take the lecture without the lab--your grade will come 55% from the quizzes and 45% from the final).

Please feel free to tell either the professor or the TAs about any comments or suggestions you might have about how to improve the class. The best way to do this is by electronic mail.

I hate to talk about cheating, because I like to assume there will be none, but the board office says I must: If the TAs or I find conclusive evidence that you have cheated on a quiz, lab, or exam, you will be removed from the course and a letter will be written to your provost. Please note that the TAs run an automated code comparator and they will find it if you copy code from each other or from previous year's assignments.

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larrabee@cse.ucsc.edu