CPUtehon

CPUtehon is a fictional CPU architecture intended for educational use and open hardware experimentation. It appears in online tutorials and community wikis as a modular, extensible design that helps illustrate core microarchitectural concepts such as pipelining, caching, and instruction set design without the complexities of real-world commercial cores.

The base design emphasizes simplicity and portability. The core is described as a 32-bit RISC-like instruction set with an optional extension mechanism for custom instructions. A typical implementation features a five-stage in-order pipeline by default, with configurable options for out-of-order execution in advanced variants. The architectural model supports 32 GPRs, a small set of special registers, and a unified memory system with configurable caches.

Tools and implementations for CPUtehon are commonly provided as open-source reference artefacts, including an assembler, a cycle-accurate simulator, and FPGA-ready RTL designs. Educational materials present hardware-software co-design exercises, such as adding custom instructions, experimenting with branch prediction, and measuring cache behavior. Because CPUtehon is not standardized, different forks may vary in specifics but share the same didactic goals.

History and reception: CPUtehon originated in online communities and classroom resources in the early 2010s as a teaching aid. It is valued for its approachable scope and clarity, though it is not intended to reflect production CPUs. Critics note that the lack of a formal standard limits real-world applicability and that implementations may diverge significantly between sources.

See also: RISC-V, OpenRISC, MIPS; concepts such as pipelining, cache memory, and hardware-software co-design.