Current microprocessors are effectively a system-on-a-chip, as they incorporate processing cores, interconnections, shared and private caches and DRAM controllers on a single die. Consequently, it is imperative to have fast and accurate simulation tools for such systems; this paper such a tool for simulating all current and announced variants of multicore processors that use the predominant PC (X86, X86-64) instruction set, as well as external DRAM memory and buses. We discuss the major techniques used for speeding up the simulation and improving the overall accuracy, and the simulation of system-level details such as coherent caches, on-chip interconnections, memory bus and DRAM. We also demonstrate a 8-fold speedup against a widely-used popular tool.
['Hui Zeng', 'Matt T. Yourst', 'Kanad Ghose', 'Dmitry Ponomarev']
MPTLsim: a simulator for X86 multicore processors