Ocelot: Enabling Vector Extension on BOOM — An Open-Source Journey
We present Ocelot , an open-source project adding vector extension support to Berkeley Out-of-Order Machine (BOOM) RISC-V core. In our latest v2 release, we adopted the Open Vector Interface from SemiDynamics, allowing the vector unit to be decoupled from the core and significantly boosting unit-stride memory performance through coalescing. Ocelot's development was accelerated by open-source tools such as Tenstorrent's Whisper simulator, showcasing how collaboration in the RISC-V ecosystem drives rapid hardware innovation. We would like to share of open-source development journey and invite the community to collaborate and help shape the future of open-source hardware design.