The Saturn Microarchitecture Manual

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2024-11-13 21:30:05

This manual describes the Saturn Vector Unit, a parameterized and extensible vector microarchitecture executing the RISC-V vector extension. Saturn was developed to address an academic need for a representative, compliant, and flexible generator of RISC-V vector units targeting deployment in domain-specialized cores. Saturn is implemented as a parameterized Chisel RTL generator, enabling a range of possible Saturn configurations across many target deployment scenarios. This document discusses the microarchitectural details of all Saturn components.

Chapter 1 describes the motivation for Saturn and compares Saturn’s design approach to those of existing data-parallel microarchitecture archetypes

Support extensibility with custom vector instructions, functional units, and accelerators that leverage the baseline capability in the standard RVV ISA

This chapter presents a background discussion of deployment scenarios for data-parallel systems and the dominant architectures in the commercial space for such systems. Saturn, as an implementation of a modern scalable vector ISA targeting deployment in specialized cores, fills an underexplored niche in the space of open-source data-parallel microarchitectures. A comparison of Saturn’s microarchitecture philosophy to alternative vector approaches is discussed.

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