Design Space Exploration Using Cycle Accurate Simulator

Multi-Processor System on Chip (MPSoC) architectures have become a mainstream technology for obtaining performance improvements in computing platforms. With the increase in the number of cores, the role of cache memory has become pivotal. An ideal memory configuration is always desired to be fast and large; but, in fact, striking to balance between the size and access time of the memory hierarchy is considered by processor architect. Design space exploration is used for performance analysis of systems and helps to find the optimal solution for obtaining the desired objectives. In this chapter, we explore two design space parameters, i.e., cache size and number of cores, for obtaining the desired energy consumption. Moreover, previously presented energy models for multilevel cache are evaluated by using cycle accurate full system simulator. Our results show that with the increase in cache sizes, the number of cycles required for application execution decreases, and by increasing number of cores, the throughput improve.