Variable Precision Capabilities in RISC-V Processors
Abstract
This work proposes to extend RISC-V with Variable
Precision (VP) Floating-Point (FP) capabilities to accelerate
scientific computing applications. It adopts the UNUM type I
FP format in main memory to overcome the limitation of the
IEEE 754 standard. Our work comprises: 1/ a VP FP RISC-V
coprocessor; 2/ a RISC-V ISA extension for the unit, 3/ and a
programming model to support VP floats in C/C++. Results have
shown that our system can be more than 100x faster than the
MPFR library when executing basic arithmetic operations.
Research Areas
