PERCIVAL: RISC-V CPU for the study of emerging posit arithmetic

What is it about?

The posit representation for real numbers is an alternative to the ubiquitous IEEE 754 floating-point standard. In this work, we present PERCIVAL, an application-level posit RISC-V core based on CVA6 that can execute all posit instructions, including the quire fused operations. In addition, Xposit, a RISC-V extension for posit instructions is incorporated into the LLVM compiler. These elements allow for the native execution of posit instructions as well as the standard floating-point ones, further permitting the comparison of these representations. FPGA and ASIC synthesis show the hardware cost of implementing 32-bit posits and highlight the significant overhead of including a quire accumulator. However, results show that the quire enables a more accurate execution of dot products. In general matrix multiplications, the accuracy error is reduced up to 4 orders of magnitude. Furthermore, performance comparisons show that these accuracy improvements do not hinder their execution, as posits run as fast as single-precision floats and exhibit better timing than double-precision floats, thus potentially providing an alternative representation.

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Photo by Volkan Olmez on Unsplash

Photo by Volkan Olmez on Unsplash