March 2020 – Observations from Uppsala

Intel Blog Post: “Quit Thinking and Look” – Mea Culpa Chasing a Performance Bug

I have written before about the debug advice to “Quit thinking and look.” It means that you should not form conclusions prematurely. Stop and look at what is going on instead of guessing and cooking up theoretical scenarios. Sound advice that I completely failed to follow in the case that I just chronicled on my Intel Blog: https://software.intel.com/en-us/blogs/2020/03/18/quit-thinking-and-look-chasing-simics-performance

Intel Blog Post: Shift-Left for a Snowy Ridge

There is a new blog post on the Intel Developer Zone on how we used Simics virtual platforms for the new Intel® Atom® P5900 series of system-on-chip (previously known as Snow Ridge). It talks about how shift-left works both inside of Intel and with our customers for the new chip, and the kinds of virtual platform models you use for different types of use cases.

See https://software.intel.com/en-us/blogs/2020/03/17/seeing-the-early-snow-on-the-ridge

Simulating Computer Architecture with “Mechanistic” Models – No more 100k Slowdown?

I have been working with computer simulation and computer architecture for more than 20 years, and one thing that has been remarkably stable over time is the simulation slowdown inherent in “cycle accurate” computer simulation. Regardless of who I talked to or what they were modeling, the simulators ran at around 100 thousand times slower than the machine being modeled. It even holds true going back to the 1960s! However, there is a variant of simulation that aims to make useful performance predictions while running around 10x faster (or more) – mechanistic models (in particular, the Sniper simulator).