Eight-Bit Vector SoftFloat Extension for the RISC-V Spike Simulator

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Publicado en:Electronics vol. 14, no. 19 (2025), p. 3924-3942
Autor principal: Marcelli, Andrea
Otros Autores: Abdallah, Cheikh, Barbirotta Marcello, Mastrandrea, Antonio, Menichelli Francesco, Olivieri, Mauro
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MDPI AG
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024 7 |a 10.3390/electronics14193924  |2 doi 
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045 2 |b d20250101  |b d20251231 
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100 1 |a Marcelli, Andrea 
245 1 |a Eight-Bit Vector SoftFloat Extension for the RISC-V Spike Simulator 
260 |b MDPI AG  |c 2025 
513 |a Journal Article 
520 3 |a The recent demand for 8-bit floating-point (FP) formats is driven by their potential to accelerate domain-specific applications with intensive vector computations (e.g., machine learning, graphics, and data compression). This paper presents the design, implementation, and application of the software model of an 8-bit FP vector arithmetic operation set, compliant with the RISC-V vector instruction set architecture. The model has been developed as an extension of the SoftFloat library and integrated into the RISC-V reference instruction-level simulator Spike, providing the first open-source 8-bit SoftFloat extension for an instruction-set simulator. Based on the SoftFloat library templates for standard FP formats, the proposed extension implements the two widely used 8-bit formats E4M3 and E5M2 in both Open Compute Project (OCP) and IEEE 754 variants. In host-time micro-kernels, FP8 delivers +2–4% more elements per second versus FP32 (across vfadd/vfsub/vfmul) and ≈5% lower RSS; E4M3 and E5M2 perform similarly. Enabling FP8 in Spike increases the stripped binary by ~1.8% (mostly .text). The proposed extension was used to fully verify and correct errors in the vector FP unit design for the eProcessor European project, and continues to be used to verify other 8-bit FP unit implementations. 
653 |a Machine learning 
653 |a Software 
653 |a Accuracy 
653 |a RISC 
653 |a Artificial intelligence 
653 |a Data compression 
653 |a Computer vision 
653 |a Neural networks 
653 |a Design 
653 |a Natural language processing 
653 |a Libraries 
653 |a Instruction sets (computers) 
653 |a Workloads 
653 |a Floating point arithmetic 
653 |a Array processors 
653 |a Efficiency 
700 1 |a Abdallah, Cheikh 
700 1 |a Barbirotta Marcello 
700 1 |a Mastrandrea, Antonio 
700 1 |a Menichelli Francesco 
700 1 |a Olivieri, Mauro 
773 0 |t Electronics  |g vol. 14, no. 19 (2025), p. 3924-3942 
786 0 |d ProQuest  |t Advanced Technologies & Aerospace Database 
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