Performance Boost In Powerful Real-Time Cortex-R Processor Using Data Prefetch Control


High-performance processors employ hardware data prefetching to reduce the negative performance impact of large main memory latencies. An effective prefetching mechanism can improve cache hit rate significantly. Data prefetching boosts the execution performance by fetching data before it is needed. While prefetching improves performance substantially on many programs, it can significantly red... » read more

A Hierarchical Instruction Cache Tailored To Ultra-Low-Power Tightly-Coupled Processor Clusters


A technical paper titled “Scalable Hierarchical Instruction Cache for Ultra-Low-Power Processors Clusters” was published by researchers at University of Bologna, ETH Zurich, and GreenWaves Technologies. Abstract: "High Performance and Energy Efficiency are critical requirements for Internet of Things (IoT) end-nodes. Exploiting tightly-coupled clusters of programmable processors (CMPs) ha... » read more

RISC-V Driving New Verification Concepts


Semiconductor Engineering sat down to discuss gaps in tools and why new methodologies are needed for RISC-V processors, with Pete Hardee, group director for product management at Cadence; Mike Eftimakis, vice president for strategy and ecosystem at Codasip; Simon Davidmann, founder and CEO of Imperas Software; Sven Beyer, program manager for processor verification at Siemens EDA; Kiran Vittal, ... » read more

Prefetch Side Channels Undermine the Isolation Between User and Kernel Space on AMD CPUs


This new technical paper titled "AMD Prefetch Attacks through Power and Time" is from researchers at Graz University of Technology and CISPA Helmholtz Center for Information Security. Note, this is a prepublication paper for the USENIX Security Symposium in Boston in August 2022.   This paper includes countermeasures and mitigation strategies, and the paper indicates that the findings were di... » read more