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| A. PCI System Architecture |
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| The basis for the modern PC infrastructure, PCI serves both as a hardware interface and a software interface model. Will cover overview of the hardware system and the programming and configuration mechanisms. |
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| How SLI works at a high level and the requirements for the chipsets. Includes coverage of the new technologies for hybrid GPU SLI. |
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| Impacts of Vista. Major new features, changes in SW paradigms, impacts on HW, WEI benchmarks, and new requirements for WHQL. |
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| The early PC hangers-on including things like interrupt mechanisms, timers, legacy address maps and IO spaces and their relevance today. |
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| System overview including: changes and benefits versus AC'97, CODEC & controller architecture and hardware/software interactions. |
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| F. Chipset Power Consumption & Management |
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| Workloads of interest for thermal and battery life conditions. Will cover the power consumption in recent chipsets under these workloads and techniques used to manage power & thermals. |
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| Describes PCIE (Gen 1 & Gen2) at the system level including deviations and enhancements from PCI/PCI-X. Will cover high level behavior of the physical interface, the link training, credit allocation and tracking. |
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| System level architecture, protocol and link descriptions for HyperTransport through HT3. |
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| DRAM memory internal architecture and how this influences the memory subsystem. Will describe the evolution of memory families and the impact to controller requirements through DDR3. |
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| Overview of video encoding standards and hardware software mechanisms required for decode and video quality enhancement. |
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| K. USB System Architecture |
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| Covers USB & USB2 system architecture including overview of the protocol as well as a comparison of the host controller standards. |
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| Covers the PATA to SATA evolution and AHCI host controller as well as an introduction to SAS. Will also give an overview of RAID levels and implementation. |
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| General software architectures and the hardware mechanisms in place or planned in CPUs, chipsets and other IO devices to improve performance and stability. |
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| N. Security in PC Systems |
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| Security technologies and their application including TPM and HDCP. |
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| O. PC Performance Analysis |
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| Analyzing and estimating PC system performance both through lab experimentation and pre-silicon techniques like Amdahl's law. Will involve descriptions of several example performance bottlenecks. |
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