Abstract
Detailed micro-architecture studies often require time-consuming,
cycle-accurate simulation. Unfortunately, many benchmarks of
interest, like the SPEC benchmarks, run for tens of billions of
instructions and are prohibitive to simulate to completion. Instead,
researchers typically must confine themselves to simulating samples of
the program's overall execution. This report presents detailed
interval-trace data about the SPECint programs'
branch-prediction and cache behavior. The report then argues that
accurate simulation results can be obtained using a single, short
simulation window of just 50 million instructions. They key to
obtaining accurate results is to choose this simulation window
carefully, and in particular to avoid unrepresentative behavior at the
beginning of programs' execution.