• Instruction set design, instruction encoding, function call support.


• Performance quantification.


• Hardware implementation of MIPS: single cycle, multi-cycle.


• Pipelining concepts, MIPS pipelining, structural hazards, data hazards, data forwarding, control hazards, pipeline control, exceptions in the pipeline.


• Cache design, cache performance analysis.


• Virtual memory, VM and caches.


• Hard disk basics, RAID, Hamming codes.


• Bus protocols.