PowerImpact is a cycle-accurate microarchitecture-level performance and power simulator for VLIW/EPIC architectures. It is based on the microarchitecture-level performance simulator Lsim in IMPACT and a few parameterized power models. PowerImpact reads the user specified power parameters and system configuration, then computes performance and power statistics for each functional unit and the whole system in every clock cycle. PowerImpact can be used to evaluate software and compiler optimization, microarchitecture innovation, and software and hardware co-design/tradeoff for performance and power optimization. The latest release of PowerImpact includes the new leakage power model with temperature dependence.
Note: Lsim supports both VLIW and SuperScalar, but we only integrated power model to its VLIW simulator.
This research was partially supported by the SRC grant 2000-HJ-782 and Hewlett-Packard Research Labs. We developed PowerImpact based on IMPACT toolset. Address comments to Professor Lei He.