Microarchitectural objectives

A further central experimental goal of the Morello Programme has been to establish the viability of CHERI-enabled microarchitecture when composed with contemporary high-performance processor design. The Morello SoC has 4 processor cores based on the Neoverse N1 processor, a Mali G76 GPU, and a modified memory controller. The modified N1 cores maintain the features in the Armv8.2-A Neoverse N1 while adding the 129-bit CHERI capability protection model. Morello is backwards compatible with Armv8-A architecture systems in AArch64 (AArch32 support was disabled for simplicity).

The resulting design, despite being a first-generation prototype developed on an accelerated timescale, achieved both frequency and microarchitectural objectives, clocking at 2.5GHz and having a <6% area overhead in the core clusters (CPU, L1, L2, and L3) as compared to the baseline Armv8.2-A-only design (AArch32 support enabled). Important microarchitectural concerns included the potential effects of capability compression, bounds checking, and DDC/PCC control of memory accesses on the critical path for the cores themselves. All timing objectives for these paths were achieved.