Risc-V

RISC-V (pronounced “risk-five”) is an open, royalty-free RISC ISA originally designed to support academic research and education, and now increasingly used in commercial silicon. Unlike MIPS, ARM, or x86, RISC-V is not owned by any single company — its specification is maintained by RISC-V International, and anyone is free to implement it without paying licensing fees. This openness, combined with a deliberately small and modular base ISA, has made it popular in everything from microcontrollers to research CPUs to (increasingly) high-performance application processors. ...

Pipelining — First Principles What is pipelining? Pipelining is the technique of overlapping the execution of multiple instructions. An instruction consists of multiple pieces of work. Instead of completing one instruction entirely before starting the next, we divide the work into stages and let different instructions occupy different stages simultaneously. For a simple example: IF ID EX MEM WB Instruction 1 → → → → → Instruction 2 → → → → Instruction 3 → → → Instruction 4 → → At any moment, several instructions are being worked on, but each is at a different stage. ...