I didn't see any specs for this SoC in the article, did I miss it?
it's 64-bit, LE/BE, and it's implementing a "Finite State Machine" (similar technique to picorv32, if you know that design). this because we wanted to keep it REALLY basic, and also very clear as a Reference Design, none of the "optimised pipelined decoders and issuers" that you normally find, which make it really, really difficult to see what the hell is going on.
bear in mind this includes SVP64: https://git.libre-soc.org/?p=soc.git;a=blob;f=src/soc/simple...
if you go back several revisions, the non-Vectorised version is like... 400 lines?