Performance evaluation is at the foundation of computer architecture research and development.
Contemporary microprocessors are so complex that architects cannot design systems based on
intuition and simple models only. Adequate performance evaluation methods are absolutely
crucial to steer the research and development process in the right direction. However rigorous
performance evaluation is non-trivial as there are multiple aspects to performance evaluation
such as picking workloads selecting an appropriate modeling or simulation approach running
the model and interpreting the results using meaningful metrics. Each of these aspects is
equally important and a performance evaluation method that lacks rigor in any of these crucial
aspects may lead to inaccurate performance data and may drive research and development in a
wrong direction. The goal of this book is to present an overview of the current
state-of-the-art in computer architecture performance evaluation with a special emphasis on
methods for exploring processor architectures. The book focuses on fundamental concepts and
ideas for obtaining accurate performance data. The book covers various topics in performance
evaluation ranging from performance metrics to workload selection to various modeling
approaches including mechanistic and empirical modeling. And because simulation is by far the
most prevalent modeling technique more than half the book's content is devoted to simulation.
The book provides an overview of the simulation techniques in the computer designer's toolbox
followed by various simulation acceleration techniques including sampled simulation
statistical simulation parallel simulation and hardware-accelerated simulation. Table of
Contents: Introduction Performance Metrics Workload Design Analytical Performance
Modeling Simulation Sampled Simulation Statistical Simulation Parallel Simulation and
Hardware Acceleration Concluding Remarks
