Open-source RISC-V cores are increasingly adopted in high-end embedded domains such as automotive, where maximizing instructions per cycle (IPC) is becoming critical. Building on the industry-supported open-source CVA6 core and its superscalar variant, CVA6S, we introduce CVA6S+, an enhanced version incorporating improved branch prediction, register renaming and enhanced operand forwarding. These optimizations enable CVA6S+ to achieve a 43.5% performance improvement over the scalar configuration and 10.9% over CVA6S, with an area overhead of just 9.30% over the scalar core (CVA6). Furthermore, we integrate CVA6S+ with the OpenHW Core-V High-Performance L1 Dcache (HPDCache) and report a 74.1% bandwidth improvement over the legacy CVA6 cache subsystem.
@article{arxiv.2505.03762,
title = {CVA6S+: A Superscalar RISC-V Core with High-Throughput Memory Architecture},
author = {Riccardo Tedeschi and Gianmarco Ottavi and Côme Allart and Nils Wistoff and Zexin Fu and Filippo Grillotti and Fabio De Ambroggi and Elio Guidetti and Jean-Baptiste Rigaud and Olivier Potin and Jean Roch Coulon and César Fuguet and Luca Benini and Davide Rossi},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2505.03762},
year = {2025}
}