A Taxonomy of Performance Assurance Methodologies and its Application in High Performance Computer Architectures

This paper presents a systematic approach to the complex problem of high confidence performance assurance of high performance architectures based on methods used over several generations of industrial microprocessors. A taxonomy is presented for performance assurance through three key stages of a product life cycle-high level performance, RTL performance, and silicon performance. The proposed taxonomy includes two components-independent performance assurance space for each stage and a correlation performance assurance space between stages. It provides a detailed insight into the performance assurance space in terms of coverage provided taking into account capabilities and limitations of tools and methodologies used at each stage. An application of the taxonomy to cases described in the literature and to high performance Intel architectures is shown. The proposed work should be of interest to manufacturers of high performance microprocessor/chipset architectures and has not been discussed in the literature.