Chapter 1. (Sections 1.1 - 1.7)

Technology Trends

Cost, Price, and trends

Measuring and Reporting Performance: Benchmarks, Comparing and Summarizing Performance

Quantitative Principles of Computer Design: the idea that empirical study of programs is important

Chapter 5. Memory Hierarchy Design (Section 5.1 - 5.13)

memory hierarchy levels and goals (speed, capacity, and cost) - Figure 5.1

Locality of reference (temporal and spatial)

Idea of cache: cache: type (direct mapped, fully associative, set associative); replacement

algorithms; write policies (write-through, write-back); write allocate and no-write allocate; block size; number/level of caches; unified vs. split cache

Cache performance: general formula, types of misses (3 C's)

General idea of the 17 cache optimizations (Figure 5.26 is a good summary)

Main Memory and Organizations for Improving Performance: Wider Main Memory, Interleaving, Independent Memory banks

Memory Technology: General idea of DRAMs, fast page mode, syschronous, DDR, DDR SRAM vs. RAMBUS

Virtual Memory: General idea of paging, TLB, Protection, multi-level page table

Hardware support for OS and Protection: user/system modes, memory protection, CPU timer

General idea of segmentation and combining paging and segmentation