Skip to main content

Author: Jonathan Balkind - Assistant Professor of Computer Science at UCSB

With nine years of development under our belts, a key philosophy of the OpenPiton platform is to provide scalable, high-performance manycore processors in an open, technology-agnostic, and upstream-first way. We have been striving to build a design that is portable across simulators and technology processes and we are excited to bring support for coherent, manycore OpenHW CORE-V CVA6 clusters on Intel FPGAs through an upcoming release. This bolsters our position of OpenPiton and CVA6 being an ideal platform for RISC-V software development as the broader ecosystem continues to mature.

OpenPiton has a particular focus on enabling advanced research, providing a common design which can be integrated with for research and early-stage development in a variety of new technology areas. As a result, we are very excited about Intel’s recent work with CVA6 and OpenPiton, as demonstrated in their VLSI Technology Symposium paper, “An 8-core RISC-V Processor with Compute near Last Level Cache in Intel 4 CMOS”. Taping out such a cluster in an advanced technology node such as Intel 4 while demonstrating functioning multicore Linux shows the potential for others to build advanced systems with CVA6 clusters. The functioning 8-core design is representative of CVA6 clusters that we would like to standardize in the OpenHW ecosystem for broad community use.

C

CORE-V CVA6 8-core Open-Source RISC-V Cluster

Thanks to recent contributions to CVA6, our upcoming releases will bring CVA6 support to parity with the upstream core managed by OpenHW Group. With U-Boot recently adopting OpenPiton and CVA6 as a supported platform, we will offer a standard Linux boot environment with all upstream-supported technology. With support for Intel® Pathfinder for RISC-V*, software developers will be able to test out their software on a standard CVA6 core cluster on FPGAs with confidence for the accompanying hardware design being realized in silicon.

Learn more about our work by visiting my Jonathan Balkind profile at UC Santa Barbara.

* Intel, the Intel logo, and other Intel marks are trademarks of Intel Corporation or its subsidiaries. Other names and brands may be claimed as the property of others.

Back to the top