Computer and Systems Architecture Commons^™

A Comparison Of X86 Computer Architecture Simulators, Ayaz Akram, Lina Sawalha

Computer Architecture and Systems Research Laboratory (CASRL)

The significance of computer architecture simulators in advancing computer architecture research is widely acknowledged. Computer architects have developed numerous simulators in the past few decades and their number continues to rise. This paper explores different simulation techniques and surveys many simulators. Comparing simulators with each other and validating their correctness has been a challenging task. In this paper, we compare and contrast x86 simulators in terms of flexibility, level of details, user friendliness and simulation models. In addition, we measure the experimental error and compare the speed of four contemporary x86 simulators: gem5, Sniper, Multi2sim and PTLsim. We also discuss …