Two teams of students from the Department of Computer Science and Technology of Tsinghua University have achieved remarkable results in the 7th "Loongson Cup" National Student Computer System Capability Challenge (NSCSCC 2023) CPU Design Competition, held at Henan University of Technology. The team "NOP", composed of Liu Mingdao, Gao Huan’ang, Wang Bowen, and Hua Jiacheng, won the only special prize on the LoongArch track of this competition. The team "Distributed", composed of Chen Yue, Zhang Yixiang, Zhu Yuzhang, and Liu Yiqian, won the third prize. The two participating teams are instructed by Chen Kang, Lu Youyou, Li Shanshan and Zheng Ninghan, teachers from the Department of Computer Science and Technology. Graduate students Cui Yikai, Zhang Wei, Gao Yichuan, Chen Jiajie, and Chen Shengqi, among others also provided technical guidance.
Based on the LA32R instruction set architecture developed by Loongson, the team "NOP" implemented an out-of-order processor with five execution pipelines and a maximum depth of 13 pipeline stages on the competition's FPGA development board. It supports Linux 5.14 kernel and can drive peripherals such as PS/2, VGA, and Flash on the development board. Compared to the baseline openLA500 processor, the overall speedup ratio of the NOP core reached 3.00 and the IPC speedup ratio reached 1.402. Note: The processor design code and adaptation system software have all been open-sourced. For more information, visit: https://github.com/NOP-Processor/NOP-Core.
A total of 103 teams from colleges and universities across the country participated in this competition, with 31 teams shortlisted for the final. There were two tracks in this competition, MIPS and LoongArch, with two special prize teams (one team for each track), two first prize teams, six second prize teams, and 21 third prize teams.
Editor: Li Han
