Performance Evaluation of an Out-of-Order RISC-V CPU: A SPEC INT 2017 Study

After almost a decade of waiting, SPEC CPU 2017 was released in 2017. CPU designers have adopted the new benchmarks to evaluate the performance of their designs. Compared to its predecessor SPEC CPU 2006, the average number of code lines, instructions, and memory operations has significantly increased. In this paper, we contrast SPEC CPU 2017 and SPEC CPU 2006 benchmarks regarding performance metrics on a RISC-V processor. Principal Component Analysis (PCA) results show that, with only a few exceptions, the analyzed SPEC CPU 2017 workloads are a subset of SPEC CPU INT 2006 workloads in terms of RISC-V performance metrics. Although the benchmark subsets are very similar, we identified some outliers that would be interesting to use for microarchitecture studies as complementary workloads to SPEC CPU 2006.