Breaking the Memory Wall with a Flexible Open-Source L1 Data-Cache
Davy Million, Noelia Oliete-Escuín, César Fuguet · 2024
The lack of concurrency and pipelining in the memory sub-system of recent open-source RISC-V processors, such as the CVA611https://github.com/openhwgroup/cva6, is increasingly becoming the performance bottleneck. Recent updates to the new RISC-V High Performance Ll Data-cache (HPDcache), now fully integrated with the CVA6, bring significant (up to +234%) speedups in key benchmarks with a negligible 5.92% area impact. In this short paper, we detail these improvements, compare performance with existing caches and highlight the benefits of this new, open-source data-cache.