Computer Architecture Performance Evaluation Methods

Book excerpt: The goal of this book is to present an overview of the current state-of-the-art in computer architecture performance evaluation. The book covers various aspects that relate to performance evaluation, ranging from performance metrics, to workload selection, to various modeling approaches such as analytical modeling and simulation. And because simulation is by far the most prevalent modeling technique in computer architecture evaluation, the book spends more than half its content on simulation, covering an overview of the various simulation techniques in the computer designer's toolbox, followed by various simulation acceleration techniques such as sampled simulation, statistical simulation, and parallel and hardware-accelerated simulation. The evaluation methods described in this book have a primary focus on performance. Although performance remains to be a key design target, it no longer is the sole design target. Power consumption and reliability have quickly become primary design concerns, and today they probably are as important as performance. Other important design constraints relate to cost, thermal issues, yield, etc. This book focuses on performance evaluation methods only. This does not compromise on the importance and general applicability of the techniques described in this book because power and reliability models are typically integrated into existing performance models. These integrated models pose similar challenges to the ones handled in this book. The book also focuses on presenting fundamental concepts and ideas. The book does not provide much quantitative data. Although quantitative data is crucial to performance evaluation, to understand the fundamentals of performance evaluation methods it is not. Moreover, quantitative data from different sources may be hard to compare, and may even be misleading, because the contexts in which the results were obtained may be very different - a comparison based on these numbe