Memory system¶

Load store unite¶

The LSU implementation is characterised by :

LQ / SQ : Usually, 16 of each
Load from AGU : To reduce the load latency, if the LQ has nothing for the load pipeline, then the AGU can directly provide its fresh calculation without passing by the LQ registers
Load Hit speculation : In order to reduce the load to use latency (to 3 cycles instead of 6), there is a cache hit predictor, speculatively waking up depending instructions
Hazard prediction : For store, both address and data are provided through the issue queue. So, a late data will also create a late address, potential creating store to load hazard. To reduce that occurence, a hazard predictor was added to the loads.
Store to load bypass : If a given load depend on a single store of the same size, then the load pipeline may bypass the store value instead of waiting for the store writeback
Parallel memory translation : For loads, to reduce the latency, the memory translation run in parallel of the cache read.
Shared address pipeline : Load and store use the same pipeline to translate the virtual address and check for hazards.

Here is a few illustrations of the shared and the writeback pipeline :

The MMU implementation is characterised by :

2D organisation : For each level of the page table a parameterizable number of direct mapped ways of translation cache can be specified.
Hardware refilled : Because that’s cheap
Caches direct hit : Allows the instruction cache to check its way tags directly against the MMU TLB storage in order to improve timings (at the cost of area)

For RV32, the default configuration is to have :

The area of the TLB cache is kept low by inferring each way into a distributed ram.

Here is a few illustrations of the MMU design