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Microarchitecture and Circuits for a 200 MHz Out-of-Order Soft Processor Memory System

Published: 09 December 2016 Publication History

Abstract

Although FPGAs have grown in capacity, FPGA-based soft processors have grown very little because of the difficulty of achieving higher performance in exchange for area. Superscalar out-of-order processors promise large performance gains, and the memory subsystem is a key part of such a processor that must help supply increased performance. In this article, we describe and explore microarchitectural and circuit-level tradeoffs in the design of such a memory system. We show the significant instructions-per-cycle wins for providing various levels of out-of-order memory access and memory dependence speculation (1.32 × SPECint2000) and for the addition of a second-level cache (another 1.60 × ). With careful microarchitecture and circuit design, we also achieve a L1 translation lookaside buffers and cache lookup with 29% less logic delay than the simpler Nios II/f memory system.

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Cited By

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  • (2022)Late-Stage Optimization of Modern ILP Processor Cores via FPGA SimulationApplied Sciences10.3390/app12231222512:23(12225)Online publication date: 29-Nov-2022
  • (2020)Delay and Bypass: Ready and Criticality Aware Instruction Scheduling in Out-of-Order Processors2020 IEEE International Symposium on High Performance Computer Architecture (HPCA)10.1109/HPCA47549.2020.00042(424-434)Online publication date: Feb-2020
  • (2020)Exploring Writeback Designs for Efficiently Leveraging Parallel-Execution Units in FPGA-Based Soft-Processors2020 IEEE 28th Annual International Symposium on Field-Programmable Custom Computing Machines (FCCM)10.1109/FCCM48280.2020.00025(120-128)Online publication date: May-2020
  • Show More Cited By

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Published In

cover image ACM Transactions on Reconfigurable Technology and Systems
ACM Transactions on Reconfigurable Technology and Systems  Volume 10, Issue 1
March 2017
206 pages
ISSN:1936-7406
EISSN:1936-7414
DOI:10.1145/3002131
  • Editor:
  • Steve Wilton
Issue’s Table of Contents
Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for components of this work owned by others than the author(s) must be honored. Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. Request permissions from [email protected].

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Association for Computing Machinery

New York, NY, United States

Publication History

Published: 09 December 2016
Accepted: 01 July 2016
Revised: 01 June 2016
Received: 01 February 2016
Published in TRETS Volume 10, Issue 1

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Author Tags

  1. Soft processor
  2. caches
  3. out-of-order execution

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Cited By

View all
  • (2022)Late-Stage Optimization of Modern ILP Processor Cores via FPGA SimulationApplied Sciences10.3390/app12231222512:23(12225)Online publication date: 29-Nov-2022
  • (2020)Delay and Bypass: Ready and Criticality Aware Instruction Scheduling in Out-of-Order Processors2020 IEEE International Symposium on High Performance Computer Architecture (HPCA)10.1109/HPCA47549.2020.00042(424-434)Online publication date: Feb-2020
  • (2020)Exploring Writeback Designs for Efficiently Leveraging Parallel-Execution Units in FPGA-Based Soft-Processors2020 IEEE 28th Annual International Symposium on Field-Programmable Custom Computing Machines (FCCM)10.1109/FCCM48280.2020.00025(120-128)Online publication date: May-2020
  • (2019)An Open Source FPGA-Optimized Out-of-Order RISC-V Soft Processor2019 International Conference on Field-Programmable Technology (ICFPT)10.1109/ICFPT47387.2019.00016(63-71)Online publication date: Dec-2019
  • (2018)Evaluating the Performance Efficiency of a Soft-Processor, Variable-Length, Parallel-Execution-Unit Architecture for FPGAs Using the RISC-V ISA2018 IEEE 26th Annual International Symposium on Field-Programmable Custom Computing Machines (FCCM)10.1109/FCCM.2018.00010(1-8)Online publication date: Apr-2018

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