Mocktails: Capturing the Memory Behaviour of Proprietary Mobile Architectures

Computation demands on mobile and edge devices are increasing dramatically. Mobile devices, such as smart phones, incorporate a large number of dedicated accelerators and fixed-function hardware blocks to deliver the required performance and power efficiency. Due to the heterogeneous nature of these devices, they feature vastly larger design spaces than traditional systems featuring only a CPU. Currently, academia struggles to fully evaluate such heterogeneous systems on chip due to the limited access and availability of proprietary workloads. To address these challenges, we propose Mocktails: a methodology to synthetically recreate the varying spatio-temporal memory access behaviour of proprietary heterogeneous compute devices. We focus on capturing the interspersed address streams of the workload and the burstiness of the injection process for proprietary compute devices commonly found in mobile systems. We evaluate Mocktails in simulation with proprietary memory traces of IP blocks. Mocktails accurately recreates the dynamic behaviour of memory access scheduling for memory controller metrics including read row hits (at most 7.3% error) and write row hits (at most 2.8% error). Architects can use Mocktails in their simulations as a substitute for a proprietary compute device, making the tool a useful conduit between industry and academia.