Cycle-Accurate Evaluation of Software-Hardware Co-Design of Decimal Computation in RISC-V Ecosystem

Software-hardware co-design solutions for decimal computation can provide several Pareto points to development of embedded systems in terms of hardware cost and performance. This paper demonstrates how to accurately evaluate such co-design solutions using RISC-V ecosystem. In a software-hardware co-design solution, a part of solution requires dedicated hardware. In our evaluation framework, we develop new decimal oriented instructions supported by an accelerator. The framework can realize cycle-accurate analysis for performance as well as hardware overhead for co-design solutions for decimal computation. The obtained performance result is compared with an estimation with dummy functions.