Research Progress of UniCore CPUs and PKUnity SoCs

Abstract

CPU and System-on-Chip (SoC) are two key technologies of IT industry. During the course of ten years of research, we have defined the UniCore instruction set architecture, and designed the UniCore CPU and the PKUnity SoC family. This cross-disciplinary practice has also fostered many innovations in microprocessor architecture, optimizing compilers, low power design, functional verification, physical design, and so on. In the mean time, we have put technology transfer on the list of our top priorities. This effort has led to several marketable products, such as ultra mobile personal computers, secure micro-workstations and 3C-converged consumer electronics. The development of the next generation products, the 64-bit multi-core CPU and SoC, is also underway. They will find their applications in secure and adaptable computers for mobile and desktop, as well as personal digital multimedia devices. Being consistent with the philosophy and the long-term plan, and by leveraging the cutting-edge process technology, we will continue to make more innovations in CPUs and SoCs, and strengthen our commitment to technology transfer. 201 and the era of desktop computing, client-server computing has become the dominant computing paradigm and this trend is expected to accelerate [1] . The growing popularity of mobile computing and communication devices promotes the convergence of computers, communication and consumer electronics, so-called 3C. Meanwhile, multimedia workloads will continue to increase in importance [2] . This naturally leads to greater demand for computers with high performance for multimedia functions and low design complexity, but at the same time, the size, weight and power consumption must remain constant [3] .

Affinity-aware DMA buffer management for reducing off-chip memory access

“…Table 1 lists the relevant architectural parameters of our evaluation environment. The system under test is PKUnity-SoC platform [15], with one UniCore-2 processor employed a harvard architecture. The PKUnity-SoC is equipped with UMAL, which is 100M fast ethernet network adapter.…”

Reducing last level cache pollution through OS-level software-controlled region-based partitioning

“…We also adopt Soft-RP in Unicore-2 [18] for achieving performance improvement. Unicore-2 [18] is a 32-bit RISC microprocessor and is implemented using TSMC 0.13-micron process.…”

“…Unicore-2 [18] is a 32-bit RISC microprocessor and is implemented using TSMC 0.13-micron process. It works at about 1GHz and has a 512KB L2 cache.…”

The Godson Processors: Its Research, Development, and Contributions

“…Over the past decade, China has made great achievements in developing advanced microprocessors that meet the requirements of both civilian and security applications. Benefited from the intensive investment of Chinese government in the 10th and 11th Five-Year Plans (2001∼2010), Chinese researchers have developed several series of microprocessors, including the Godson processors designed by the Institute of Computing Technology (ICT), Chinese Academy of Sciences (CAS) [1][2][3][4][5][6] , the UniCore/PKUnity processors designed by the Peking University [7] , the YHFT processors designed by the National University of Defense Technology [8] , the Shenwei processors developed by National High Performance IC (Shanghai) Design Center [9] and so on. Currently, China has become one of the few countries that are capable of designing general-purpose microprocessors.…”