Introducing MicroBlaze as an infrastructure for performance modeling

In this paper, we propose using the Xilinx-MicroBlaze platform as an infrastructure for developing necessary skills and introducing basic concepts in performance modeling. This infrastructure is built by augmenting the MicroBlaze soft-core processor with an FPGA-based profiling mechanism allowing an easy analysis of the functional behavior of a target algorithm. Using the MicroBlaze as reference architecture for extracting functional statistics, these statistics can be employed to assist in modeling the performance of different processor architectures against a set of specific applications.