CprE381 Computer Architecture

Course Overview

Professor: Dr. Joseph Zambreno
Semester: Fall 2019
Tools Used: ModelSim, Quartus Prime, A bunch of coffee.
Class Rating: 10/10. Dr. Zambreno is a professor that genuinely cares about his students. He often answers emails at 3AM when his students are working on their labs.
Class Difficulty (1-5): 4. You’re building a MIPS processor. I doubt anyone finds that easy the first go around.

Course Experience

Here I am, thinking that CprE288 was a tough class. That class is cakewalk in comparison to CprE381. The instructor spent zero time leading students in the path of countless all-nighters. Looking back, the class material was not all that bad, however the labs were ruthless. This is to be expected however, as building a MIPS processor is not necessarily the easiest thing to do. The scary part about the labs were that if a student didn’t test enough, there might be edge cases that would heavily affect labs down the road.
Students will be spending most of their time in the final lab, which is to implement pipelines and hazard detection within the processor. Depending on the method used to build the processor, the speed of which the processor runs will vary from student to student. While the speed is not graded, the student with the fastest processor earns bragging rights as the “best MIPS processor designer of the semester”.