Evaluating an Idea or Tradeoff
Typically many things change from one generation to next
Building prototypes for evaluation is too expensive
Case I: Want to examine in a given context
- Can assume technological and architectural parameters
- Simulate with feature turned off and turned on to examine impact
- Perhaps examine sensitivity to some parameters that were fixed
- Building accurate simulators is complex
- Contention difficult to model correctly
- Processors becoming increasingly complex themselves
Case II: Want to examine benefit of idea in a more general context
- Now machine parameters also variable
- Various sizes,granularities and organizations, performance characteristics