Reinmann is a super nice guy but this is not a very easy class. We did too well on the midterm and he made the final extremely hard. A lot of practice is needed. Homework often took a while.

I did not really enjoy this class, but I appreciate that Professor Reinman is a really good explainer so that made it easier.

The "flipped classroom" format of this class required us to watch about 1-2 hours of extra video each week, which made the instruction during actual lecture feel more optional, since it was just going over the pre-recorded lectured.

The grading in this class is stressful. I'm sure he curves nicely (grades haven't been released as of rn) but weighting 40% Midterm and 50% Final is a really unforgiving grading scheme.

Overall, this is definitely a class where an A is achievable with some effort, but actually enjoying the content and the way it's delivered will depend a lot on preference.

Prof Reinman is great! He uses a flipped classroom structure where you have to watch 1-2 hours of pre-recorded videos before each live lecture, and these videos by themselves cover the basics of the topic you will learn in the live lecture.

The live lectures, the professor goes more in depth over the topics and answers a lot of questions. He also goes over some practice problems live in order to clarify topics and such. Lectures are very engaging since its all handwritten and uses zero slides, plus professor is very fun and charismatic. Must attend these lectures, they solidify concepts and also VERY relevant to problems you will find in exams. In fact, the professor will literally tell you that this kind of problem will show up on the exam so pay attention.

Exams are tough, but the professor will curve it up. They are worth 90% of your grade: 40% being the midterm and 50% being the finals.
All of the exam questions are advanced variations of questions the professor brought up in class or high level stuff that you don't need to know the details for, so it always feels like fair game. Since they are open note, you don't need to memorize anything(although you must have a good understanding of topics, notes won't help you much).

The midterm does have a time crunch, the final was alright.

Homeworks are based on completion, and you can just bs them if you don't want to actually do it. I personally didn't do any of the homeworks and did fine on the exams, but you do you.

Take the class with reinman yo

This class was a flipped classroom, so Professor Reinman would require us to watch online videos before coming to class, which was basically a Q&A. The workload wasn't too bad, consisting of seven homework assignments which didn't take more than a few hours. The midterm wasn't bad, but the material gets more difficult in the second half of the class and as a result, the final was much more difficult. The midterm and final decide most of your grade, and the averages were high for both, so it pays to study a lot for both.

This class is difficult, mainly because the tests are focused on very specific subjects, and the amount of practice problems aren't that good.

This class covers a variety of computer architecture topics, but the midterm and final are always from a subset of very specific practice problems which you need to study (in my case, cram) to do well. The problem is that many of these topics are not covered well online, forcing you to rely on Reinman's antiquated normal time lectures (since he does reverse classroom).

For example, one question on the exam was focused on a concept called "TCPI"; however, this was nowhere in the textbook, nor was it in the prelecture slides + lectures that Reinman does for his reverse classroom setup. Hence, you're forced to learn everything about this question from: old tests on test banks, the practice final, 1 lecture where Reinman kinda shoddily covers this material, and discussion slides (which end up just taking the same problems from test banks or the practice final).

This style of learning is mirrored in many other questions in this class. The main reason this class is hard is because of lack of practice problems; many times, the concept is only covered once in a practice problem, whereas it takes many repetitions for me to actually understand what's going on.

I managed to get an A by just cramming the small subset of practice problems that Reinman tests on. I would recommend others to do the same if they want to get an A. I don't think I learned a lot in this class through lectures or the textbook, but cramming for the exams made me learn something (although I'll probably forget it).

All in all, Reinman isn't a horrible choice for this class, but the class in my opinion is just insanely boring. However, it's not setup well at all, and there is so much material every week (textbook, prelecture, normal lecture, discussion sections), and none of it matters except like 20 minutes from discussion each week.

BEWARE: This is definitely NOT an easy class - many of us who took this class this quarter were fooled by the grade distribution from last year (because they made final optimal). The midterm was ok, but the final was much more difficult with ambiguous problems and instructions, and many people didn't do well. For some reason they decided not to curve the class at all - quite surprising - so many ended up with bad grades. The "unique" teaching style was not my favorite - the live lectures (they called it "Q&A section") were completely unorganized and confusing from my point of view, and you'd be probably better off not attending them. I later found TA discussions and textbooks much more helpful, so I stopped attending them since Week 3 or so, and managed to get an A (but with lots of hard work).

I love that low key sense of humor, hands down, one of the best pictures of my college life, amazing professor

Reinman is the only professor you should be taking this class with. He is a great lecturer and is very willing to go over things again when students seem confused. Even with this, the material is very hard to follow. It gets very complicated and nuanced, and you need to have a very in depth understanding in order to do well on the exams. The homework is manageable but really only covers the easier topics.

Reinman doesn't use the flipped classroom approach anymore and made all the flipped classroom videos optional and additional content for this quarter, opting instead to lecture in a more traditional format. I feel like this made the class a lot more manageable in terms of the workload, but this still isn't a very easy class. The first 5 weeks aren't too bad and focus primarily on calculating CPI and execution time, design tradeoffs, ALU and multiplier designs, and the single cycle datapath. The difficulty of this class really ramps up after the midterm as we talk about pipelining the datapath, caching, virtual memory, and cache coherence. Reinman himself is a pretty good lecturer however which is nice.

The midterm was fair and moderately difficult with an average of about 80%. The final was significantly harder and had an average of about 75%. Reinman said he curved the class, but probably not by a lot since my raw score was 89.25 and I got an A-. The grade distribution this quarter was 29% some kind of A, 37% some kind of B, and 20% some kind of C.

Unfortunately, this class suffers from a lack of practice material and knowing what to expect on the exams. Reinman does examples in class and gives you an idea of what kind of problems he would ask on the exam, but some of the questions on the final I honestly had no idea how to do. For example, there was a question on the final about something called "Snoopy protocol," however Reinman only went over this at a very high level in lecture, it's not in the textbook, and it wasn't on the one sample final he provided either. Also, the homework questions from the textbooks don't reflect the types of questions on the exam whatsoever.

Overall, I enjoyed this class more than I enjoyed CS 33, and the workload was definitely a lot lower than my other classes. But definitely be prepared to study for the exams and make sure you actually know what Reinman lectures about. If you just wanna get this class over with then Reinman is a good choice, but I've heard the ECE offering is easier so keep that in mind too.

Homeworks - 9 HWs graded based on completion. Can be really hard to get it correct without help from TAs.

Exams - 90% of your final grade is based on 1 midterm (40%) and 1 final (50%). They are kinda hard but the exams are open notes. Prof. Reinman does not like students pattern-matching his exams, but you can definitely get some insights if you actually watched Professor's lectures and paid attention to the stuff he emphasized. I got 91.5% as the final raw score and was curved to an A. According to other students, curve was pretty generous.

I would definitely recommend taking it with Prof. Reinman as I learned a lot, but do consider Prof. Sehat as an alternative option if you want a perfect grade. He ususally teaches ECE M116C (same course) during Fall quarter. I took ECE 188 with Prof. Sehat and he was super chill too!