Fast cycle-approximate instruction set simulation

Abstract

Instruction set simulators are indispensable tools in both ASIP design space exploration and the software development and optimisation process for existing platforms. Despite the recent progress in improving the speed of functional instruction set simulators cycle-accurate simulation is still prohibitively slow for all but the most simple programs. This severely limits the applicability of cycle-accurate simulators in the performance evaluation of complex embedded applications. In this paper we present a novel approach, namely the prediction of cycle counts based on information gathered during fast functional simulation and prior training. We have evaluated our approach against a cycle-accurate ARM v5 architecture simulator and a large set of benchmarks. We demonstrate it is capability of providing highly accurate performance predictions with an average error of less than 5.8% at a fraction of the time for cycle-accurate simulation.