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CS61C: Great Ideas in Computer Architecture

Descriptions

  • Offered by: UC Berkeley
  • Prerequisites: CS61A, CS61B
  • Programming Languages: C
  • Difficulty: 🌟🌟🌟🌟
  • Class Hour: 100 hours

This is the last course in Berkeley's CS61 series, which dives into the internal of computer architecture and will make you understand how the C language is translated into RISC-V assembly language and executed on the CPU. Unlike Nand2Tetris, this course is much more difficult and more in-depth, covering pipelining, cache, virtual memory, and concurrency-related content.

The projects are very innovative and interesting. Project1 is a warmup assignment in C. In 2020Fall, you will implement the famous Game of Life. Project2 requires you to write a fully-connected neural network in RISC-V assembly to classify handwritten digits in MNIST dataset, which is a great exercise to write assembly code. In Project3, you will use Logisim, a digital circuit simulation software, to build a two-stage pipeline CPU from scratch and run RISC-V assembly code on it. In Project4 you will implement a toy version of Numpy, using OpenMP, SIMD, and other techniques to speed up matrix operations.

In a word, this is the best computer architecture course I have ever taken.

Course Resources

  • Course Website: https://cs61c.org/su20/
  • Recordings: Youtube
  • Textbook: None
  • Assignments: 11 Labs, 4 Projects, the course website has specific requirements.

Personal Resources

All the resources and assignments used by @PKUFlyingPig in this course are maintained in PKUFlyingPig/CS61C-summer20 - GitHub.