XIOSim: power-performance modeling of mobile x86 cores

Simulation is one of the main vehicles of computer architecture research. In this paper, we present XIOSim –- a highly detailed microarchitectural simulator targeted at mobile x86 microprocessors. The simulator execution model that we propose is a blend between traditional user-level simulation and full-system simulation. Our current implementation features detailed power and performance core models which allow microarchitectural exploration. Using a novel validation methodology, we show that XIOSim’s performance models manage to stay well within 10% of real hardware for the whole SPEC CPU2006 suite. Furthermore, we validate power models against measured data to show a deviation of less than 5% in terms of average power consumption.