All notebooks · ACA · Advanced Computer Architectures · Politecnico di Milano · 2025-26

ACA Notebook

The whole course — from the RISC-V pipeline to Tomasulo, caches, vector machines and cache coherence — rewritten as lessons you can study from: figures, live simulators of the exam's own tables, past-exam exercises with model answers, and the slips of the notes corrected.

Built on the unofficial course notes by AndreVale69 (HPC-E-PoliMI-university-notes), MIT License.

Start with lesson 1

C1 C2 C3 C4 C5 C6 C7 C8 C9 C10 LD FADD SD ADDUI BNE IF ID EX ME WB IF ID EX ME WB IF IF ID EX ME WB IF ID EX ME WB IF ID EX ME WB cycles stall forwarding one instruction finishes every cycle

How to study

  1. Go in orderEach lesson builds on the previous one and takes about an hour with its demos and questions; its own estimate is at the top of the page. It ends with a bridge to the next lesson.
  2. Predict firstEvery demo comes with "Try it" tasks. Say what will happen — which instruction issues next, which block is evicted, which state the cache line ends in — move the control, and only then open the answer.
  3. Watch the red penThe lessons follow a set of student notes (unofficial, 592 pages), cross-checked against the professor's exam texts and Hennessy & Patterson. Where the notes slip — a wrong cycle in a Tomasulo table, a false "always", a formula with a missing term — a red-pen note quotes the notes, gives the correct statement and the reason.
  4. Practise like the examThe real exam is a closed-book written paper of 1 h 30 min with one hand-written A4 sheet of formulas: three exercises (pipeline and Tomasulo tables, VLIW scheduling, caches, coherence protocols), an open theory question and a block of multiple-choice quizzes. Each lesson ends with questions in exactly those forms, with model answers, and a quiz. Progress is stored in this browser.

Lessons

The lesson list, the progress and the links between lessons are built from the course map, which needs JavaScript. Enable it and reload the page. Without it you can open the first lesson and read it as plain text.

Extras