RISC-V Design · All levels

Microarchitectural Control Tradeoffs: Silicon PPA Impact

Silicon PPA Impact for Microarchitectural Control Tradeoffs.

Silicon PPA impact

Silicon PPA Impact for Microarchitectural Control Tradeoffs is anchored on Area and power per committed instruction versus branch penalty and average CPI under mixed workloads.. Convert observations into mechanism-backed decisions with explicit ownership.

  • Frequency gains that increase bubbles may lose net throughput.

  • Area growth from extension logic must justify workload value.

  • Power and thermal stability are release gates, not secondary metrics.

PPA trend view

diagram
BEFORE / AFTER TREND - Microarchitectural Control Tradeoffs

Area and power per committed instruction versus branch penalty and average CPI under mixed workloads.
  ^
  |                           o target band
  |                    o after fix + reruns
  |             o
  |      o baseline (failing)
  +--------------------------------------------------> iteration
       capture issue      isolate mechanism      close + monitor

Use this view to confirm the gain is causal and stable across seeds.