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arXiv · 2604.22314

Microarchitectural Co-Optimization for Sustained Throughput of RISC-V Multi-Lane Chaining Vector Processors

Weiying Wang·Zhiwei Zhang
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Abstract

Modern RISC vector processors rely on multi-lane parallelism and chaining to achieve high sustained throughput, yet practical execution often deviates from the ideal reference due to microarchitectural inefficiencies. This work targets the open-source RVV processor Ara and analyzes its sustained-throughput loss under a fixed hardware configuration. We first establish an ideal multi-lane chaining model that decomposes ideal execution into prologue startup, steady-state progression, and tail drain, and uses this reference to characterize real-execution deviations. Based on this model, we attribute Ara's bottlenecks to three critical paths: memory-side data supply and transaction progression, dependence-and-issue control, and operand delivery and result propagation. To address these bottlenecks, we propose coordinated optimizations, including a descriptor-driven memory front end with next-VL prefetch, early read-dependence release with dynamic local issue control, and multi-source forwarding with dual-source operand queues. Experimental results show that, without increasing raw memory bandwidth or changing the main processor configuration, Ara-Opt achieves a geometric-mean speedup of 1.33x over baseline Ara. Under roofline-based normalization, the geometric-mean gap-closed ratio reaches 12.2%. In particular, scal, axpy, ger, and gemm achieve speedups of approximately 2.41x, 1.60x, 1.52x, and 1.42x, with corresponding gap-closed ratios of 93.7%, 88.9%, 78.3%, and 59.3%, respectively. These results show that the proposed optimizations recover lost sustained throughput under essentially unchanged hardware resources and move regular streaming and high-throughput workloads closer to the roofline-based performance bound.

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Weiying Wang, Zhiwei Zhang. 2026-06-03. Microarchitectural Co-Optimization for Sustained Throughput of RISC-V Multi-Lane Chaining Vector Processors. https://arxiv.org/abs/2604.22314

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