Unlocking High-Performance AVX2 Emulation with RVV 1.0
2026-06-09 , Poster Island D

The x86-64 instruction set has a long history of backwards compatibility, and a lot of performance-intensive software, most of which may never be ported to RISC-V. While existing emulators support the Advanced Vector Extensions (AVX) extension, none do so using the RISC-V Vector (RVV) extension directly. We implemented AVX and AVX2 support in Placeholder using RVV 1.0 and compare performance with existing implementations that don't utilize RVV 1.0. Additionally, we measure the performance benefit of enabling AVX2 support in benchmarks and compare it with the performance benefit in x86-64 hardware.