Open-Source RISC-V: Energy Efficiency of Superscalar, Out-of-Order Execution

45•PaulHoule•6h ago

Comments

Pet_Ant•3h ago

> some (e.g. BOOM, Xiangshan) are developed in Chisel with limited support from industrial electronic design automation (EDA) tools

Isn't translating between languages something that LLMs should excel at? I mean I'm sure it's more than just pasting it into ChatGPT but if the design has been validated and it's understood, validating the translated version should be several orders of magnitude easier than starting from scratch.

dkjaudyeqooe•3h ago

> Isn't translating between languages something that LLMs should excel at?

No, not at all. Unless there is a large amount of training data relevant to the translation then LLMs are likely just to make up nonsense. Chisel is a very niche hardware description language.

Pet_Ant•2h ago

Very niche? That's suprising to hear. I'm not in the space, and I know it's not in the big 2/3 (is SystemVerilog distinct from Verilog), but it's been around for 13 years and even DARPA has it on their radar:

> Chisel is mentioned by the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) as a technology to improve the efficiency of electronic design, where smaller design teams do larger designs. Google has used Chisel to develop a Tensor Processing Unit for edge computing

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chisel_(programming_language)#...

bee_rider•2h ago

I wonder if they just mean niche in the context of languages generally—human or programming? I mean there are, relatively speaking, boatloads and boatloads of open source software projects out there. Hardware open source projects, well a few exist…

zozbot234•2h ago

Chisel can be compiled to Verilog out of the box, and Verilog itself should have the required support from existing EDA tools. That remark from the paper may perhaps be somewhat confused.

IshKebab•1h ago

This is true, but unless great care is taken to generate nice Verilog you're going to run into issues when you try to integrate standard tools like functional coverage, formal SVA, etc.

I haven't looked at the Chisel SVA but I do recall another HDL touting readable Verilog generation as a feature in response to Chisel's being bad (can't remember which one) so I guess it can't be great.

I think Veryl stands a decent chance of success precisely because it hews so closely to SystemVerilog - you don't lose access to all the feature industry uses. It's kind of the Typescript of SystemVerilog.

https://veryl-lang.org/

eigenform•2h ago

I'm not sure this sentence [from the paper] makes a lot of sense. The only thing non-standard is the use of Chisel (and then probably CIRCT to lower it into Verilog) - if you're actually taping these out, you're still feeding that to industry-standard EDA tools.

dlcarrier•2h ago

To the contrary, it's something especially suited to being done parametrically. Effectively, you can make a really big regex string to convert one language into a subset of another, then let the optimizer of the second language make it performant.

dkjaudyeqooe•3h ago

I feel like an open source RV CPU is very likely in the high-performance space.

The amount of effort required to design and implement such a device makes it difficult for a single company to invest in, but many interested users of it could band together to create a viable open source implementation.

I guess it's a question of a project that such an effort can crystalize around.

kimixa•1h ago

Don't forget how much of a "high-performance" implementation is due to the physical implementation, a lot of engineering effort is put into that post-HDL. And much below HDL is hard to share, as it relies too much on (closed) fab IP libraries and PDK specifics. And then the verification of that result.

Which might discourage an Open Source hardware project with shared ownership as large as a high performance implementation would require - as each cooperating company would end up using rather different products anyway.

I fear it'll become just an "Dump Over The Wall An Old Snapshot" of a few different companies work at best, rather than true cooperation.

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