How accurate should early design stage power/performance tools be? A case study with statistical simulation
To cope with the widening design gap, the ever increasing impact of technology, reflected in increased interconnect delay and power consumption, and the time-consuming simulations needed to define the architecture of a microprocessor, computer engineers need techniques to explore the design space efficiently in an early design stage. These techniques should be able to identify a region of interest with desirable characteristics in terms of performance, power consumption and cycle time. In addition, they should be fast since the design space is huge and the design time is limited. In this paper, we study how accurate early design stage techniques should be to make correct design decisions. In this analysis we focus on relative accuracy which is more important than absolute accuracy at the earliest stages of the design flow. As a case study we demonstrate that statistical simulation is capable of making viable microprocessor design decisions efficiently in early stages of a microprocessor design while considering performance, power consumption and cycle time.
statistical simulation computer architecture early design stage methods architectural power modeling