Performance Error Evaluation of gem5 Simulator for ARM Server

Computer architecture simulators are widely used to explore new ideas. The accuracy of the simulator affects the credibility of the research results. However, there is a lack of studies to evaluate the error of simulators with respect to recent processors. In this paper, we use a recent ARM server as the target machine and configure the gem5 simulator as close as possible with official public information and measurement data. In single-core mode, we perform accuracy evaluation using SPEC CPU 2006, SPEC CPU 2017, PARSEC, and SPLASH-2x benchmarks with a mean absolute percentage error (MAPE) of 26.31%. In multi-core mode, the MAPE stays around 30% for PARSEC and SPLASH-2x as the core count varies. These results help architecture researchers to quantitatively understand the performance errors between the gem5 simulator and the modern ARM processor.