Programmable Fine-Grained Power Management and System Analysis of RISC-V Vector Processors in 28-nm FD-SOI

This letter presents a RISC-V System-on-Chip (SoC) with fully integrated switched-capacitor DC-DC converters, adaptive clock generators, mixed-precision floating-point vector accelerators, a 5-Gb/s serial memory interface, and an integrated power management unit (PMU) manufactured in 28-nm FD-SOI. The vector accelerator improves performance and energy per task on a matrix multiplication kernel by 15× and 13×, respectively, and end-to-end performance on machine learning and graph analytical workloads by 8×-12×. Inclusion of microarchitectural counters and line spatial power-domain granularity facilitate the predictive power-management algorithms that reduce energy per task by 13%-22% compared to the baseline scalar processor. System level simulations of a range of SoC architectural variations with multiple cores and vector accelerators complement the silicon measurements.