CSR---SMA: A Design Space Exploration Tool for x86 and x86-64 Multicore Microprocessors

Suny At Binghamton, Binghamton NY

Investigators

Abstract

With the emerging concerns of power dissipation and ever diminishing returns on the silicon investment, the industry has moved away from developing fast single-core solutions in favor of designs that integrate muiltiple processing cores within a single chip or package. Processor development efforts and related research have always relied on the use of accurate functional and timing simulators. It is useful to have an integrated simulation environment that permits the exploration of tradeoffs among performance, power and reliability in multicore microprocessors. The proposed effort addresses a current void in this respect and aims to investigate, design, develop and disseminate exactly such a tool system for use in processor design research and pedagogy. As another advantage, the proposed simulation framework is based on the commonly used X86 and X86-64 instruction set architectures (ISAs). This permits the implementation of a full system simulator that goes well beyond the commonly available user-mode simulators in simulating not just the user-level activities but also kernel level activities accurately. The use of the X86 ISAs also permits native mode execution on the underlying PC hardware, including multicore platforms, to significantly speed up simulation over portions of the simulated code that are not of interest. The outcome of this effort will be the development of methodologies and a prototype tool implementation for accurately estimating the energy and performance characteristics of multicore microprocessors. The resulting tool will be distributed to research groups via the web, fostering research activities in microprocessor design, including the consideration of energy-performance tradeoffs.