Processor Description Languages

2.3 Retargetable Simulator Generation 21

behavioral description of the processor. Using that, they are now able to optimize

for several architectural and microarchitectural features to generate good code;how-

ever, a lot remains to be done. The microarchitectural exploration space is limited

only by human creativity, and many features open new doors for compiler opti-

mization. As compared to a native compiler, a retargetable compiler fundamentally

should have only a compilation-time penalty; however, in practice, because of the

microarchitectural nuances and idiosyncrasies,a native compiler typically performs

better than a retargetable compiler.