[Ownaginatios]

Software engineering 3GA3 is in a way the course immediately following software engineering 2DA4. While 2DA4 focused on computer components at the basic block level (AND, OR, XOR. etc), 3GA3 focuses on the next level up - the computer processor.

The course begins with teaching the fundamentals for benchmarking processors - Performance and execution time. You learn how MHz/GHz is not an affective comparison between processors in terms of performance, and learn that CPI (cycles per instruction), instruction sets and pipelining also play a major role.

From this you move onto the basic assembly language. The architecture this class focuses on is the MIPS architecture. This is because MIPS is a hell of a lot simpler than x86 when studying how the actual signals in the processor work. You learn the basic schematic of all MIPS processors (which is generally the same for other architectures too) and how each instruction is processed step by step through the registers, ALU and data memory.

After this, you learn about pipelining where you try and make each stage of the processor have a part of an instruction being processed at all times (essentially processing multiple instructions simultaneously, but still sequentially). You learn about potential hazards in pipelining (trying to get the result of one instruction for another instruction before it's finished) and problems associated with branching (what 'if' statements decompose to).

Following that, you move up into caching and paging. If you're in software engineering and embedded systems, this will give you a leg-up over mechatronics students for MECHTRON 3TB4.

Finally, the course ends with a very brief overview of graphics processors.

When I took this course, I had George Karakostas as my professor, and the breakdown was as follows:

- Homework Assignments : 5%
- Midterm Exam : 40%
- Final Exam : 55%

The homework assignments were pretty long most of the time and there were 6 of them. I would say most people in the class only did part of them or didn't do them at all. Now a word of advice - doing the homework assignments and understanding them is definitely a good idea. Both the midterm and final exam were literally a rehash of questions directly from the assignments. I would say quite a few people suffered because of this.

The graphics processor portion of the course is not on the exam. I can't tell you anything about that because a) it wasn't in the assignments either and b) I didn't listen during any of those classes. All I remember is that it was overly complicated and far too much to cover in the time we spent on it in class.

Overall, I thought the class was alright. It was pretty dry, but the professor was a decent guy (even though he's perpetually angry) and pretty funny at times. I got an 11 in the end, and the only reason I couldn't get a 12 was because the 4th deliverable for SFWR ENG 3A04 was due the same day as the exam and severely hindered my studying time. Just do the assignments, try to listen in class (or just read the book) and you should be fine.

What is the average class size for this course ?

Thanks for the review. How important is the book for the course? How good is the book in explaining concepts? And how important (useful) are the tutorials for this course?

The textbook is decent, but also pretty dry. Don't bother buying it, there is a PDF version available online. Also, it's pretty useful if you don't go to class. assignment questions typically come from there. There were scheduled tutorials for this class, but they never actually happened. The prof canceled them because in previous years he said they were useless.

The average class size was around 100 people (3rd year software + second year computer science).

Thanks for the review

can anyone post software course reviews for this term too???