We will admit it: mostly when we see a homebrew CPU design on an FPGA, it is a simple design that wouldn’t raise any eyebrows in the 1970s or 1980s. Not so with [Henry Wong’s] design, though. His x86-like design does superscalar out-of-order execution, just like big commercial modern CPUs. Of course [Henry] designs CPU architectures for Intel, so that’s not surprising. You can see a very detailed talk on the design in the video, below. You can also read the entire thesis project.
[Henry] starts out with a description of FPGAs and soft processors. He also covers the use of multiple instruction issue to increase the virtual clock rate of a CPU. In other words, if a 100 MHz CPU can do one instruction at a time, it won’t be any faster — in theory — than a 50 MHz CPU that can do two instructions at once. Of course, trying to do two at once has some overhead, so that won’t be completely true.
Our first impression is that the x86 instruction set is relatively difficult to implement. But [Henry] makes the point that if you can provide a robust implementation — which could include emulation of some of the more difficult parts like floating point — you can run a wealth of software with no changes.
We were impressed with the method used to verify the design before it went to the FPGA using Bochs, a CPU simulator together with a known-good model of the x86. That’s especially helpful when you have to implement techniques like register renaming and a distributed matrix scheduler.
If you’ve never worked with a CPU design before, this might not be a good choice for getting your feet wet. But if you are ready to move from a toy CPU to something bigger, there’s a lot of good information in here. Need even more FPGA coaching? Try our boot camps. If you’d rather hack on RISC-V, we’ve looked at that, too.
Source:: Hackaday