A SIMULATION TOOLKIT FOR x86-COMPATIBLE PROCESSORS — Xsim

[[abstract]]©1999 World Scientific-Functional-level simulators have become an indispensable tool in designing today's processors. They help to exploit the design space and evaluate various design options so as to derive a suitable processor microarchitecture. Although Intel's x86 series processors are the most popular CPU in the computers, there are only a few simulation tools available for studying these processors. This paper introduces such a simulation tool. Internally it simulates a decoupled decode/encode architecture and has a RISC core. It is trace-driven and thus has a tracing system, a trace sampling system, and a processor simulator. We will describe the internal workings of the simulation tool and demonstrate how it can be used in evaluating a specific x86-compatible processor.[[department]]資訊工程學