RISC-V Design · All levels

MMU, TLB Hierarchy, and Hardware Page-Table Walk: Silicon PPA Impact

Silicon PPA Impact for MMU, TLB Hierarchy, and Hardware Page-Table Walk.

Silicon PPA impact

Silicon PPA Impact for MMU, TLB Hierarchy, and Hardware Page-Table Walk is anchored on TLB hit rate by level, average page-walk latency, and added cycles per memory access under representative 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 - MMU, TLB Hierarchy, and Hardware Page-Table Walk

TLB hit rate by level, average page-walk latency, and added cycles per memory access under representative 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.