CommunityNews

CommunityNews

Ramping Up Open-Source RISC-V Cores: Assessing the Energy Efficiency of Superscalar, Out-of-Order Execution

Open-source RISC-V cores are increasingly demanded in domains like automotive and space, where achieving high instructions per cycle (IPC) through superscalar and out-of-order (OoO) execution is crucial. However, high-performance open-source RISC-V cores face adoption challenges: some (e.g. BOOM, Xiangshan) are developed in Chisel with limited support from industrial electronic design automation (EDA) tools. Others, like the XuanTie C910 core, use proprietary interfaces and protocols, including non-standard AXI protocol extensions, interrupts, and debug support.
In this work, we present a modified version of the OoO C910 core to achieve full RISC-V standard compliance in its debug, interrupt, and memory interfaces. We also introduce CVA6S+, an enhanced version of the dual-issue, industry-supported open-source CVA6 core. CVA6S+ achieves 34.4% performance improvement over CVA6 core.
We conduct a detailed performance, area, power, and energy analysis on the superscalar out-of-order C910, superscalar in-order CVA6S+ and vanilla, single-issue in-order CVA6, all implemented in a 22nm technology and integrated into Cheshire, an open-source modular SoC. We examine the performance and efficiency of different microarchitectures using the same ISA, SoC, and implementation with identical technology, tools, and methodologies. The area and performance rankings of CVA6, CVA6S+, and C910 follow expected trends: compared to the scalar CVA6, CVA6S+ shows an area increase of 6% and an IPC improvement of 34.4%, while C910 exhibits a 75% increase in area and a 119.5% improvement in IPC. However, efficiency analysis reveals that CVA6S+ leads in area efficiency (GOPS/mm2), while the C910 is highly competitive in energy efficiency (GOPS/W). This challenges the common belief that high performance in superscalar and out-of-order cores inherently comes at a significant cost in area and energy efficiency.

Read in full here:

Where Next?

Popular General Dev topics Top

First poster: bot
Hush Keyboards with Hushboard. Yesterday while surfing the ASCII highways of IRC (yes, IRC) a URL linking to a MacOS application scrolle...
New
First poster: dimitarvp
On Wednesday last week, Google’s Fiona Cicconi wrote to company employees. She announced that Google was bringing forward its timetable ...
New
First poster: dpritchett
It’s not what programming languages do, it’s what they shepherd you to. How many of you have listened, read or taken part in a discussio...
New
CommunityNews
ABSTRACT In lieu of a traditional , I’ve tried to distill the essence of the talk into a collection of maxims: All programmers are API ...
New
First poster: peterchancc
Why I like Clojure as a solo developer | Biff. Most of the reasons fall into a few categories: data orientation, the JVM, and the REPL.
New
First poster: bot
zig/http.zig at 7cf2cbb33ef34c1d211135f56d30fe23b6cacd42 · ziglang/zig. General-purpose programming language and toolchain for maintaini...
New
First poster: joeb
50 Shades of Go: Traps, Gotchas, and Common Mistakes for New Golang Devs. Go is a simple and fun language, but, like any other language,...
/go
New
First poster: dyowee
A Go package for building Progressive Web Apps. A package for building progressive web apps (PWA) with the Go programming language (Gola...
New
First poster: dyowee
Software engineering job openings hit five-year low?. There are 35% fewer software developer job listings on Indeed today, than five yea...
New
New

Other popular topics Top

axelson
I’ve been really enjoying obsidian.md: It is very snappy (even though it is based on Electron). I love that it is all local by defaul...
New
siddhant3030
I’m thinking of buying a monitor that I can rotate to use as a vertical monitor? Also, I want to know if someone is using it for program...
New
brentjanderson
Bought the Moonlander mechanical keyboard. Cherry Brown MX switches. Arms and wrists have been hurting enough that it’s time I did someth...
New
New
AstonJ
I have seen the keycaps I want - they are due for a group-buy this week but won’t be delivered until October next year!!! :rofl: The Ser...
New
AstonJ
In case anyone else is wondering why Ruby 3 doesn’t show when you do asdf list-all ruby :man_facepalming: do this first: asdf plugin-upd...
New
DevotionGeo
The V Programming Language Simple language for building maintainable programs V is already mentioned couple of times in the forum, but I...
New
mafinar
Crystal recently reached version 1. I had been following it for awhile but never got to really learn it. Most languages I picked up out o...
New
sir.laksmana_wenk
I’m able to do the “artistic” part of game-development; character designing/modeling, music, environment modeling, etc. However, I don’t...
New
AstonJ
This is a very quick guide, you just need to: Download LM Studio: https://lmstudio.ai/ Click on search Type DeepSeek, then select the o...
New