Syllabus
Week-by-week schedule covering hardware fundamentals through speculative decoding.
Introduction to Computer Architecture
Patterson & Hennessy Ch. 1
Number Systems & Data Representation
P&H Ch. 2
CPU Design & Instruction Sets
P&H Ch. 3-4
Memory Hierarchy & Caching
P&H Ch. 5
GPU Architecture & Parallel Computing
Kirk & Hwu Ch. 1-3
Introduction to Neural Networks
Goodfellow et al. Ch. 6
Transformer Architecture Deep Dive
Vaswani et al. (2017)
LLM Inference & KV Cache
Selected papers
Quantization Techniques (GGUF, GPTQ, AWQ)
Selected papers
Speculative Decoding Theory
Leviathan et al. (2023)
Speculative Decoding Lab
llama.cpp documentation
Benchmarking & Performance Analysis
Course materials
Advanced Topics & Future Directions
Selected papers
Final Project Presentations
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