Feasibility of Combined Area and Performance Optimization for Superscalar Processors Using Random Search

When designing embedded systems, one needs to make decisions concerning the different components that will be included in a microprocessor. An important issue is the chip area vs. performance trade-off. In this paper we investigate the relationship between chip area and performance for su-perscalar microprocessors. We investigate the feasibility to obtain a suitable configuration by searching. We show that our approach gives a good configuration after 100 to 150 iterations using a simple random search algorithm. This shows the feasibility of our approach, in particular when more sophisticated search algorithms are employed as we plan in future work. 1