SiFive P550 Microarchitecture Deep Dive: RISC-V's Ambitious Step
2025-01-27
This article delves into SiFive's P550 microarchitecture, a RISC-V processor core targeting high-performance applications. The P550 employs a three-wide out-of-order execution architecture with a 13-stage pipeline, aiming for 30% higher performance in less than half the area of a comparable Arm Cortex A75. The analysis compares P550 to the Cortex A75, examining branch prediction, instruction fetch and decode, out-of-order execution, and the memory subsystem. While the P550 shows weaknesses in areas like unaligned memory access, it represents a significant step forward for RISC-V. Though needing further refinement, the P550 demonstrates SiFive's progress towards high-performance general-purpose CPUs.
Hardware
Microarchitecture