The final exam is closed-book, written-only, and consists of a set of questions/exercises covering the course topics. On average, there are 12-13 questions with a total of 20 points.
- 10 points (50%) are required to get the grade 3, which is the lowest passing grade,
- 13 points (65%) are needed to pass with grade 2, and
- 17 points (85%) are required to pass with grade 1.
Please note that if you need these grades converted to an american grading system, the local grade of 3 may end up as an american grade D, for which you might not get credit.
When grading the exam, I try to point out deficiencies which influenced the points awarded. Sometimes a particular answer is awarded a range of points. The lower bound corresponds to the amount that would be awarded if I were grading the exam in a very strict manner, while the upper bound corresponds to a very benevolent grading. A large difference between the lower and upper bounds in the total indicates that many answers were too ambiguous. To determine the exam outcome, I usually take the total from the middle of the range (never below middle). You will be provided with a scanned copy of your graded exam answer sheet.
The exam covers the following topics:
- fundamentals of computer performance (relation between execution time and clock cycles, instructions, and clock rate, Amdahl’s law),
- instruction set architecture (what kind of instructions do we need and why, compilation of basic elements of structured programming, i.e., assignments, conditionals, loops, function calls, argument passing),
- fundamentals of digital circuits (basic gates, concept of sequential and combinational circuits, datapath building blocks such as adders, ALUs, multiplexors, decoders),
- processor implementation (single-cycle and multi-cycle datapath and control),
- performance improvement techniques (pipelining datapath and control, pipeline hazards, forwarding/bypassing, branch prediction, handling of exceptions, static and dynamic multiple-issues pipelines and related techniques, such as out-of-order execution, speculation, register renaming), and
- memory hierarchy (caches, operation of write-through and write-back caches, cache miss model, cache architectures and their impact on cache misses, cache coherency, coherency protocols such as IV, MSI and MESI, false sharing).
The goal of the exam is to test understanding, not the ability to memorize facts (in most cases, the necessary facts are included in the exercise). The required level of understanding roughly corresponds to the level of detail presented in the lectures and lecture slides. Going though relevant exercises in the H&P book is highly recommended.