How can CAS simulators like PTLsim achieve cycle accurate simulation of x86 hardware?
问题 Can somebody enlighten me how does CAS software like http://www.ptlsim.org/ work? How do they achieve cycle accuracy if there is neither information how many cycles are used per instruction nor CPU branch prediction logic is known? Or is everything available over NDAs? I suppose they probably can be pretty accurate with caches being hit or missed (maybe I'm wrong but I think it's easier to predict the internal algorithm), but without knowledge how pipelining and superscalarity are implemented