SPREX: A soft processor with Runahead execution
Why this work is in the frame
A frame that forgets how it found something cannot be audited. These are the routes that admitted this work.
Bibliographic record
Abstract
There is a growing demand for high-performance computation cores in embedded devices built over reconfigurable hardware. As a result, various soft core architecture techniques have been proposed, each targeting different application classes. This work presents SPREX, an FPGA-friendly Runahead soft processor architecture that targets applications with unstructured instruction level parallelism. The architecture of choice for such applications has traditionally relied on a mix of superscalar, out-of-order, and speculative execution. Unfortunately, the implementation of these techniques does not map well on reconfigurable hardware. This work shows that by exploiting the key characteristics of reconfigurable fabrics, and by tuning the architecture for the embedded environment, a fast and practical Runahead soft processor is viable. Runahead has been shown to offer many of the benefits of conventional architectures for the applications this work targets. We show that the proposed Runahead architecture improves performance of a simple 5-stage pipeline by 9% on the average and by as much as 36%.
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Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from it