  RISC-Vs growing traction leads to the release of new RISC-V cores on a near
monthly basis. In this growing and diverse ecosystem, understanding the
performance and other properties of a RISC-V core is of great importance since
selecting the best fitting core is mandatory for a successful project.
Analyzing RISC-V cores by hand is not possible due to the ever-increasing
number of available cores and available software benchmarks might not be
fine-grained enough to understand a core completely. Programming and powerful
programming languages have proven to provide the productivity that is required
to keep pace with these fast developments. In this paper we present a case
study in which we use WAWK, a front-end for the open-source Waveform Analysis
Language, to analyze the performance of all instructions of SERV, a well known
bit-serial RISC-V core. With WAWK, only a few lines of code are necessary to
calculate the respective metric on the waveform generated during simulation.

Hardware Architecture