The Hwacha Microarchitecture Manual, Version 3.8.1

This work-in-progress document outlines the Hwacha decoupled vector-fetch microarchitecture in detail. We first discuss how we modified the open-source Rocket Chip SoC generator to provide a system framework comparable to commercially available data-parallel accelerators. We exploit the generator’s RTL libraries, including an in-order core implementing the RISC-V instruction set, multiple levels of coherent caches, and a standardized accelerator interface we used to attached the Hwacha vector accelerator. The vector accelerator executes the Hwacha instruction set architecture described in the Hwacha vector-fetch architecture manual. We present the overall machine organization, then describe the details of the vector frontend and the scalar unit, vector execution unit (VXU), vector memory unit (VMU), and the vector runahead unit (VRU).

EECS-2015-263