This course will involve reading assignments and homework exercises from the textbook Computer Organization & Design: the Hardware/Software Interface, the second edition, by David Patterson and John Hennessy. This book is required. An errata sheet for the textbook is available on-line, as are a number of ``Web extensions'' to the textbook provided by the authors. I may also give out other reading assignments by email or in journals.
I plan to cover chapters 1-6, and Appendices B and C of the textbook. This is about 675 pages, so you need to read about 25 pages per lecture, on average. Chapters 1 and 3 should be largely review, so we'll go through them quickly. If we have enough time, I'd like to cover parts of Chapters 7 and 9 as well.