Lecture, four hours; outside study, eight hours. Requisite: course M151B. Recommended: course 111. Design and implementation of high-performance systems, advanced memory hierarchy techniques, static and dynamic pipelining, superscalar and VLIW processors, branch prediction, speculative execution, software support for instruction-level parallelism, simulation-based performance analysis and evaluation, state-of-art design examples, introduction to parallel architectures. Letter grading.