IEEE Access (Jan 2024)

Hardware Software Co-Design for Multi-Threaded Computation on RISC-V-Based Multicore System

  • Binh Kieu-do-Nguyen,
  • Khai-Duy Nguyen,
  • Nguyen The Binh,
  • Khai-Minh Ma,
  • Tri-Duc Ta,
  • Duc-Hung Le,
  • Cong-Kha Pham,
  • Trong-Thuc Hoang

DOI
https://doi.org/10.1109/ACCESS.2024.3505940
Journal volume & issue
Vol. 12
pp. 177312 – 177326

Abstract

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The open-source and customizable features of the RISC-V Instruction Set Architecture (ISA) have facilitated its rapid adoption since its publication in 2011. The availability of numerous free core designs leads to the pervasiveness of RISC-V-based devices on diverse applications spanning the Internet of Things (IoT), embedded systems, artificial intelligence (AI), and virtual/augmented reality (VR/AR). The increasing prevalence of RISC-V cores has consequently caused a demand for high-performance and resource-efficient multicore systems. However, while numerous proposals exist for constructing multicore systems on conventional architectures, realizing an efficient multicore system that effectively leverages the features of RISC-V remains a challenge. This paper introduces a novel hardware/software co-design methodology to address these bottlenecks while minimizing resource utilization. Experimental results demonstrate the efficiency of our approach, exhibiting significant performance gains over single-threaded implementations and even surpassing traditional multi-threaded approaches.

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