A Superscalar Out-of-Order x86 Soft Processor for FPGA (2017)
A Superscalar Out-of-Order x86 Soft Processor for FPGA







































Title:



Issue Date:
Nov-2017
Abstract (summary):
Although FPGAs continue to grow in capacity, FPGA-based soft processors have grown very little because of the difficulty of achieving higher performance in exchange for area. Superscalar out-of-order processor microarchitectures have been used successfully for hard processors for many years, and promise large performance gains if they can also be used for FPGA soft processors. Out-of-order soft processor microarchitectures have so far been avoided due to the area increase and the expectation that a loss in
clock frequency would more than offset the instructions-per-cycle (IPC) gains.
This thesis presents the design of the microarchitecture and circuits of a two-issue (superscalar) out-of-order x86 FPGA soft processor.
Our microarchitecture achieves 2.7 times the per-clock performance of a performance-tuned Nios II/f, Alteraâ  s fastest (RISC-like, single-issue, pipelined) soft processor, and 0.8 times the frequency, for a total performance improvement of 2.2 times. The processor is projected to use around 28700 Stratix IV Adaptive Logic Modules (ALMs), which is 6.5 times the area of the Nios II/f, but still only a small fraction of a modern FPGA.
In addition to performance improvements, our microarchitecture design is sufficiently complete and correct to boot most 32-bit x86 operating systems unmodified.
We also design circuits for most of the components in the processor. These highly-optimized circuits are key to achieving high operating frequency despite the increased complexity of out-of-order execution.
Through the design of our processor, we demonstrate that a high-performance processor microarchitecture can be implemented successfully on FPGAs. Beyond the proposed microarchitecture, the processor circuits presented in this thesis will enable new out-of-order soft processor microarchitectures of varying performance, cost, and instruction set, created from variations of our circuits.

Content Type:
Thesis











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