DLX

The DLX (pronounced "Deluxe") is a RISC processor architecture designed by John L. Hennessy and David A. Patterson, the principal designers of the Stanford MIPS and the Berkeley RISC designs (respectively), the two benchmark examples of RISC design (named after the Berkeley design). The DLX is essentially a cleaned up (and modernized) simplified Stanford MIPS CPU. The DLX has a simple 32-bit load/store architecture, somewhat unlike the modern MIPS architecture CPU. As the DLX was intended primarily for teaching purposes, the DLX design is widely used in university-level computer architecture courses. There are two known "softcore" hardware implementations: ASPIDA and VAMP. The ASPIDA project resulted in a core with many nice features: it is open source, supports Wishbone, has an asynchronous design, supports multiple ISAs, and is ASIC proven. VAMP is a DLX-variant that was mathematically verified as part of Verisoft project. It was specified with PVS, implemented in Verilog, and runs on a Xilinx FPGA. A full stack from compiler to kernel to TCP/IP was built on it. In the Stanford MIPS architecture, one of the methods used to gain performance was to force all instructions to complete in one clock cycle. This forced compilers to insert "no-ops" in cases where the instruction would definitely take longer than one clock cycle. Thus input and output activities (like memory accesses) specifically forced this behaviour, leading to artificial program bloat. In general MIPS programs were forced to have a lot of wasteful NOP instructions, a behaviour that was an unintended consequence. The DLX architecture does not force single clock cycle execution, and is therefore immune to this problem. In the DLX design a more modern approach to handling long instructions was used: data-forwarding and instruction reordering. In this case the longer instructions are "stalled" in their functional units, and then re-inserted into the instruction stream when they can complete. Externally this design behaviour makes it appear as if execution had occurred linearly.