
132 Chapter 2 CPUs
needs to model the bus, as well as register files and other major structural com-
ponents. In general, a power simulator must model all significant sources of
capacitance in the processor since dynamic power consumption is directly
related to capacitance. However, power simulators must trade-off accuracy for
simulation performance just like other cycle-accurate simulators.
Wattch and
SimplePower
The two best-known power simulators are Wattch [Bro00] and SimplePower
[Ye00]. Both are built on top of SimpleScalar and add capacitance models for
the major units in the microarchitecture.
System designers have used custom processors to run ...