Towards Developing High Performance RISC-V Processors Using Agile Methodology
Yinan Xu, Zihao Yu, Dan Tang, Guokai Chen, Lu Chen, Lingrui Gou, Yue Jin, Qianruo Li, Xin Li, Zuojun Li, Jiawei Lin, Tong Liu, Zhigang Liu, Jiazhan Tan, Huaqiang Wang, Huizhe Wang, Kaifan Wang, Chuanqi Zhang, Fawang Zhang, Linjuan Zhang, Zifei Zhang, Yangyang Zhao, Yaoyang Zhou, Yike Zhou, Jiangrui Zou, Ye Cai, Dandan Huan, Zusong Li, Jiye Zhao, Zihao Chen, Wei He, Qiyuan Quan, Xingwu Liu, Sa Wang, Kan Shi, Ninghui Sun, Yungang Bao
Abstract
While research has shown that the agile chip design methodology is promising to sustain the scaling of computing performance in a more efficient way, it is still of limited usage in actual applications due to two major obstacles: 1) Lack of tool-chain and developing framework supporting agile chip design, especially for large-scale modern processors. 2) The conventional verification methods are less agile and become a major bottleneck of the entire process. To tackle both issues, we propose MINJIE, an open-source platform supporting agile processor development flow. MINJIE integrates a broad set of tools for logic design, functional verification, performance modelling, pre-silicon validation and debugging for better development efficiency of state-of-the-art processor designs. We demonstrate the usage and effectiveness of MINJIE by building two generations of an open-source superscalar out-of-order RISC-V processor code-named XIANGSHAN using agile methodologies. We quantify the performance of XIANGSHAN using SPEC CPU2006 benchmarks and demonstrate that XIANGSHAN achieves industry-competitive performance.