BOOM is a core that fits into the rocketchip SoC ecosystem. Or said another way, BOOM wears rocketchip's skin. :D [i.e., caches, memory system, uncore, test har

BOOM is a core that fits into the rocketchip SoC ecosystem. Or said another way, BOOM wears rocketchip's skin. :D [i.e., caches, memory system, uncore, test harnesses...] Default rocketchip uses the Rocket core, which is a single-issue in-order core. If things are going well, a two-wide BOOM is 50% to 100% faster than Rocket [as measured using SPECint and Coremark]. If you want to get started, I'd recommend starting with rocketchip/sifive dev boards (they provide ready-to-go FPGA images). Rocketchip has a company supporting it, it's open-source, and it will boot Linux (if you use the RV64G version). But it's a very complex code base, so if you want to hack the RTL, it will be a steep learning curve. If you just want to play with smaller, easier to grok cores, you can find some ready-to-go FPGA cores like picorv32. That's targeting high-frequency FPGA softcore applications and is a multi-cycle design (trading off IPC for higher frequencies).