Summary: 0018-9162/02/$17.00 © 2002 IEEE February 2002 59
C O V E R F E A T U R E
SimpleScalar:
An Infrastructure
for Computer
System Modeling
T
o accelerate hardware development,
designers often employ software models of
the hardware they build. They implement
these models in traditional programming
languages or hardware description lan-
guages, then exercise them with the appropriate
workload. Designers can execute programs on
these models to validate the performance and cor-
rectness of a proposed hardware design.
Programmers can use software models to develop
and test software before the real hardware becomes
available. Although software models are slower than
their hardware counterparts, programmers can build

Source: Austin, Todd M. - Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, University of Michigan
Ernst, Daniel J. - Department of Computer Science, University of Wisconsin-Eau Claire

Collections: Computer Technologies and Information Sciences; Engineering