Micro-architectural simulation of in-order and out-of-order ARM microprocessors with gem5

Abstract

Heterogeneous multicore systems have gained momentum, specially for embedded applications, thanks to the performance and energy consumption trade-offs provided by inorder and out-of-order cores. Micro-architectural simulation models the behavior of pipeline structures and caches with configurable parameters. This level of abstraction is well known for being flexible enough to quickly evaluate the performance of new hardware implementations, such as future heterogeneous multicore platforms. However, currently, there is no open-source micro-architectural simulator supporting both in-order and out-of-order ARM cores. This article describes the implementation and accuracy evaluation of a micro-architectural simulator of Cortex-A cores, supporting in-order and out-of-order pipelines and based on the open-source gem5 simulator. We explain how to simulate CortexA8 and Cortex-A9 cores in gem5, and compare the execution time of ten benchmarks with real hardware. Both models, with average absolute errors of only 7 %, are more accurate than similar microarchitectural simulators, which show average absolute errors greater than 15 %.