AURA-1 chip design archive: docs, blog, research folders, tiny-gpu work, GDS viewer
7858a76 verified Vortex open-source GPU — downloaded repos
Shallow clones (latest snapshot, no history) from https://github.com/orgs/vortexgpgpu/repositories, 2026-08-10. Vortex is Georgia Tech's RISC-V-based open-source GPGPU — full RTL, testbenches, compiler, and drivers all public. v3.0 (June 2026) added a 3D graphics pipeline, Vulkan driver, tensor cores, and ASIC synthesis flows.
| Repo | Size | What it is |
|---|---|---|
vortex/ |
333M | The main repo — RTL is in vortex/hw/rtl/ (SystemVerilog). Runtime (runtime/), simulator drivers (sim/), docs (docs/), tests. Cloned with submodules |
vortex_tutorials/ |
462M | MICRO/ISCA tutorial slides and hands-on exercises — best learning path |
skybox/ |
271M | Vortex Graphics research (Skybox) — the 3D pipeline work that fed v3.0 |
Volt/ |
792K | VOLT — their open GPU compiler project |
pocl/ |
56M | POCL fork — OpenCL runtime with Vortex device support |
Skipped (build dependencies, multi-GB — clone only if building the full stack):
llvm (2.3GB compiler fork), vortex-toolchain-prebuilt (17.6GB binaries),
mesa (440M Vulkan driver fork), HIP-path forks (chipStar, HIPCC,
ROCm-Device-Libs), NVPTX-SPIRV-Translator.
Where to start reading RTL
vortex/hw/rtl/VX_define.vh— architecture parametersvortex/hw/rtl/core/— the SIMT core: fetch, warp scheduler, execute unitsvortex/hw/rtl/cache/— cache subsystemvortex/docs/— microarchitecture documentation- Compare with tiny-gpu: same concepts (warps, SIMT, memory coalescing), real scale.
To actually build/run: follow vortex/README.md (needs the llvm toolchain —
prebuilt binaries download during ./ci/install_dependencies.sh setup).