Engineering Commons^™

Otter Vector Extension, Alexis A. Peralta

Computer Engineering

This paper offers an implementation of a subset of the "RISC-V 'V' Vector Extension", v0.7.x. The "RISC-V 'V' Vector Extension" is the proposed vector instruction set for RISC-V open-source architecture. Vectors are inherently data-parallel, allowing for significant performance increases. Vectors have applications in fields such as cryptography, graphics, and machine learning. A vector processing unit was added to Cal Poly's RISC-V multi-cycle architecture, known as the OTTER. Computationally intensive programs running on the OTTER Vector Extension ran over three times faster when compared to the baseline multi-cycle implementation. Memory intensive applications saw similar performance increases.