Breaking the Memory Wall with a Flexible Open-Source L1 Data-Cache

The lack of concurrency and pipelining in the memory sub-system of recent open-source RISC-V processors, such as the CVA6
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https://github.com/openhwgroup/cva6, is increasingly becoming the performance bottleneck. Recent updates to the new RISC-V High Performance Ll Data-cache (HPDcache), now fully integrated with the CVA6, bring significant (up to +234%) speedups in key benchmarks with a negligible 5.92% area impact. In this short paper, we detail these improvements, compare performance with existing caches and highlight the benefits of this new, open-source data-cache.