Practical techniques for performance estimation of processors

Abstract

Performance estimation of processor is important to select the right processor for an application. Poorly chosen processors can either under perform very badly or over perform but with high cost. Most previous work on performance estimation are based on generating the development tools, i.e., compilers, assemblers etc from a processor description file and then additionally generating an instruction set simulator to get the performance. In this work we present a simpler strategy for performance estimation. We propose an estimation technique based on the intermediate format of an application. The estimation process does not require the generation of all the development tools as in the prevalent methods. As a result our method is not only cheaper but also faster.