A mechanistic performance model for superscalar in-order processors

Mechanistic processor performance modeling builds an analytical model from understanding the underlying mechanisms in the processor and provides fundamental insight in program-microarchitecture interactions, as well as microarchitecture structure scaling trends and interactions. Whereas prior work in mechanistic performance modeling focused on superscalar out-of-order processors, this paper presents a mechanistic performance model for superscalar in-order processors. We find mechanistic modeling for in-order processors to be more challenging compared to out-of-order processors because the latter are designed to hide latencies, and hence from a modeling perspective, detailed modeling of instruction execution latencies and dependencies is not required. The proposed mechanistic performance model for superscalar in-order processors models the impact of non-unit instruction execution latencies, inter-instruction dependencies, cache/TLB misses and branch mispredictions, and achieves an average performance prediction error of 2.5% compared to detailed cycle-accurate simulation. We extensively evaluate the model’s accuracy and we demonstrate its usefulness through three applications: (i) we compare in-order versus out-of-order performance, (ii) we quantify the impact of compiler optimizations on in-order performance, and (iii) we perform a power/performance design space exploration