AstroLIT: enabling simulation-based microarchitecture comparison between Intel® and Transmeta designs

Abstract

While the out-of-order engine has been the mainstream micro-architecture-design paradigm to achieve high performance, Transmeta took a different approach using dynamic binary translation (BT). To enable detailed comparison of these two radically different processor-design approaches, it is natural to leverage well-established simulation-based methodologies. However, BT-based processor designs pose new challenges to standard sampling-based simulation methodologies. This paper describes these challenges, and it also introduces the AstroLIT methodology to address them.