The Crossroads of Destiny

[Zee530]

Yes, this is the point i find myself in my life right now my friends, well not really anyways.

So i find myself in my final year of my education for my B.Sc. degree in computer science and ofcourse at this point life surely gets complicated.

As i believe is common in most tertiary institutions, on the final year of your studies students are required to write a project/paper/thesis on anything pertaining to their course of study which is where i find myself, however i have NO IDEA WHAT TO WRITE ABOUT.

Students will be assigned supervisors (yet to happen) and are to submit 3 topics to out of which the supervisor picks one for the student to write about and ofcourse there are people such as myself with no sense of direction in which case the supervisor picks a topic for you which has a 3% chance of getting an A

I wont say i have any strong points but i will say i'm a bit weak when it comes to programming but if i have to i wont mind writing something about it, there is even a professor who says anybody under her must write something programming related.

At this crossroad i find myself and not knowing which way to goto, if anybody can recommend any 3 topics for me that i can present to my supervisor without him saying this is stupid and he chooses something else for me i'll be grateful

[LordVador]

Just an idea. You could have a look to the archives of your shool. That could give you an idea about theses that have been written by former students. Some subjects might inspire you. Anyway you should choose a subject that you appreciate, something you'd like to talk about. The most difficult is to find the idea, the "white page", I had to face this problem a few years ago

[Shonumi]

I was going to study CS, but that never happened (except for one C++ class that was fun, but pretty easy. I got my BA in English, so writing papers was basically all I did. :p

Well, I suggest that you find something interesting to you. Sometimes you very much need to write about subjects which you could not care less, but for something like this, where the choice of topic is yours, you should choose something appealing to yourself (but still appropriate to the paper's requirements, of course.)

Granted, I can't say for certain if the following ideas are suitable in any way for your paper, but writing about video game emulation would probably make for some good topics. One route to go is explaining all of the enhancements and advantages emulators have over their physical counterparts, e.g. longevity, required storage space, graphical improvements/alterations via shaders, filters like hq2x, AA, AF, bigger resolutions, hacks and fan translations, save states, better/configurable controls, and the list goes on. You can delve into the technical aspects of why each is possible on your computer but not on a home console. You can choose a variety of emulators too, Dolphin's not the only emulator enhancing gameplay.

But like I said, I can't garauntee that it's acceptable to your school or professors. Regardless, try to find something interesting or that you feel is important. You don't want to get stuck writing about something like databases or social media if it is uninspiring to you. Having the motivation to write is a key part in the process.

[Zee530]

Thanks, i've started looking into the archives of past students but havent really gone through most of them but i will eventually.

Writing about emulation might be one of my latter choices but regarless i shall add to my list of possible options, i need something i can easily understand and also my supervisor can easily understand as they'll ask me questions on whatever it is i'll write about.

The submission is sometime in october or november so no need to rush, i'll take it nice and slow and try to find enough topics from different areas and start eliminating and shortening the list till i get my last 3

[NaturalViolence]

Quote:As i believe is common in most tertiary institutions, on the final year of your studies students are required to write a project/paper/thesis on anything pertaining to their course of study which is where i find myself, however i have NO IDEA WHAT TO WRITE ABOUT.

This sentence was painful to read. Let me get this straight, you just spent 4 years in a high intensity degree program about one of the broadest subjects in the world (computer science) and you have no idea what to write about? You have no idea what interests you?

Good god man. I'm not even technically a cs student and I've written countless essays on technical subjects. What are the requirements for the essay (including length)?

[Zee530]

Happens to the best of us. I'm more interested to go into something hardware based after my education as far as we're talking interests. There is no established length per se but most people stick between 50 and a 100 pages.

[NaturalViolence]

What are your interests in the subject area? Have you focused on anything in particular in your self-education?

I can't come up with a good topic for you. I can only tell you topics that I would be good at writing on, but that has nothing to do with what you're good at. You will have to figure that out on your own. I would probably choose multiprocessing, microarchitecture, or instruction set architecture as a topic since there is a lot of info. out there for those three and a lot of sub-topics to talk about yet they still demonstrate that you have actually learned something. But that's just me. I find it easier to write about things involving logic design (pretty much everything in cs, I know) since you can often spend lots of pages elaborating on your opinions and why you view one design as being preferable to another.

[Zee530]

I've always been interested in the working of a computer's processor, one of the topics i've downlisted and a possible topic to write about was ivybridge and how its better than its predecessors as well as intel vs AMD processors, i also wanted to discuss about graphic cards also. Basically Computer architecture in General is something i'm looking into.

[NaturalViolence]

Ok. Here are some subtopics of microprocessor design that might be interesting to incorporate into your essay:

1. risc and cisc
   
   • Fixed length vs. variable length instructions
   • Operand use, number of operands and types (register-register also called load/store, register-memory, memory-memory)
   • addressing modes
   • microcoding vs. direct execution
     
2. DLP (data level parallelism, SIMD/vector)
3. ILP (instruction level parallelism, MIMD)
   
   • superscalar vs. vliw (and EPIC)
   • pipelining
     
     • pipeline length, instruction latency vs. clock frequency
       
   • out-of-order vs. in-order execution
     
     • instruction window size
     • pipeline width
     • control/reordering logic
       
4. different bus designs (too many to list here)
5. DMA engines vs. memory mapped I/O vs. port I/O
6. von neumann vs. harvard and modified harvard architectures
7. memory management models
   
   • segmented vs. continuous
   • linear vs. non-linear
   • physical vs. virtual
   • paging and page faults
     
8. caching (way too many sub-topics to list)
9. fetch logic and PC (program counter)
10. decode logic, many different types
11. ALU design
12. when and when not to use multiplexing
13. instructions
    
    • arithmetic
    • memory access
    • bitwise
    • logical
    • unconditional jump
    • conditional jump
    • comparison
      
14. MMU design
15. interrupt handling
16. instruction set design
17. TLP (thread level parallelism) and multiprocessing (way too much to list)
18. DSPs
19. GPUs
20. microprocessors
21. bit-slice processors
22. microcontrollers
23. and many, MANY more if you do some research
    

This is just what I could come up with off the top of my head. If you spent a day researching topics you could easily make this list of sub-topics 10x as long if not longer.

[Zee530]

Thanks alot NV, i'll start looking into this right away, let me know if there's anything you think i should add, i might also post some questions for you along the way.