AMPS: Accelerating McPAT Power Evaluation Without Cycle-Accurate Simulations

Multicore power, area, and timing (McPAT) is one of the popular system-level simulators that can evaluate power either in design space explorations (DSEs) or in run-time applications. However, when estimating the dynamic power of a processor, the inputs of McPAT are microarchitecture statistics captured from cycle-accurate simulations, which usually are unacceptably time-consuming. In this letter, we propose an accelerated McPAT power simulator (AMPS) without any cycle-accurate simulations. The statistics are analytically modeled using micro-architecture independent characteristics of the application (MICA) that extracted from the trace profiling. AMPS is verified under the SPEC2006 benchmark suite. The average error of power evaluation using AMPS is 4.96% relative to that based on the simulation statistics from gem5. Meanwhile, the evaluation time can be sped up by 9.76 times compared with the approach of accurate simulation inputs.