IBM T. J. Watson Research Center

© 2007 IBM Corporation

The PowerPC Models in Bluespec

Jessica Tseng, K Ekanadham, Pratap PattnaikT J Watson Res. Lab., IBM, Yorktown Heights, NY

IBM T. J. Watson Research Center

© 2007 IBM Corporation2 The First Bluespec Workshop, MIT 08/13/2007

PowerPC Architecture Spans Wide Range of Markets

embedded systems

automotives

cell broadband engineservers

super computers (BG/L)

powerarchitecture

journey to mars

game consoles

IBM T. J. Watson Research Center

© 2007 IBM Corporation3 The First Bluespec Workshop, MIT 08/13/2007

Flexible Support Structures For Software

Multi-Threading

VirtualizationSupport

SophisticatedCache

Protocols

Large PageSizes

IBM T. J. Watson Research Center

© 2007 IBM Corporation4 The First Bluespec Workshop, MIT 08/13/2007

Our Research Goal and Vision

Goal:

– Promote Power architecture as building block for a wide range of systems and find innovative ways to extend Power architecture with accelerator for specific applications.

Vision:

– Create an ecosystem to foster Power architecture and eseof its use for system research by the community.

IBM T. J. Watson Research Center

© 2007 IBM Corporation5 The First Bluespec Workshop, MIT 08/13/2007

Bluespec PowerPC Processor Model

Since Bluespec advertises itself as a high-level synthesis solution that can reduce the design and modeling times, it is ideal for rapid design changes and experimentations.

– Collaborate with MIT to create a public PowerPC ISA compatible core from the public available documents (Book I, II, and III) using Bluespec.

– Further synthesize the Bluespec generated verilog code onto FPGAsfor real-time evaluation and simulation.

IBM T. J. Watson Research Center

© 2007 IBM Corporation6 The First Bluespec Workshop, MIT 08/13/2007

The Basic PowerPC Processor ModelSimple in-order pipeline, with standard PowerPC ISA.

Support for multiple threads per core.

Support for address translation with variable page sizes.

Support for multiple cores with shared caches in a node.

Support for coherency and synchronization across nodes.

IU

XU FU

L1

L2interface

IBM T. J. Watson Research Center

© 2007 IBM Corporation7 The First Bluespec Workshop, MIT 08/13/2007

Thank you!