Design and validation of a performance and power simulator for PowerPC systems

Abstract

This paper describes the design and validation of a performance and power simulator that is part of the Mambo simulation environment for PowerPC® systems. One of the most notable features of the simulator, designated as Tempo, is the incorporation of an event-driven power model. Tempo satisfies an important need for fast and accurate performance and power simulation tools at the system level. The power and performance predictions from the simulated model of a PowerPC 405GP (or simply 405GP) were validated against a 405GP-based evaluation board instrumented for power measurements using 42 application/dataset combinations from the EEMBC benchmark suite. The average performance and energy-prediction errors were 0.6% and -4.1%, respectively. In addition to describing Tempo, we show examples of how well it can predict the runtime power consumption of a 405GP microprocessor during application execution.