Modelling advanced computer architectures with SimEng, the Simulation Engine

Modern processors are extremely sophisticated, able to execute many instructions every cycle, with hundreds of instructions in flight at once. They include advanced features such as comprehensive branch prediction, wide vector and matrix instructions, and deep memory hierarchies with complex prefetching. Modelling these behaviours accurately is challenging, and doing so at speed is even more so. Commonly used processor simulators such as gem5 are slow and can't model advanced features accurately enough to be used in architecture development. To solve this problem, the Simulation Engine, or SimEng, has been developed. SimEng is fast, accurate, and can model advanced features. SimEng can be modified quickly and easily, and can model the most advanced cores implementing the Arm and RISC-V instruction sets. In this talk we will describe SimEng and its abilities, including recent results modelling the latest, high-performance cores.