Computer system simulators are major tools used by architecture researchers to develop and evaluate new ideas. Clearly, such evaluations are more conclusive when compared to commercial state-of-the-art architectures. However, the behavior of key components in existing processors is often not disclosed, complicating the construction of faithful reference models. The data prefetching engine is one of such obscured components that can have a significant impact on key metrics such as performance and energy.

Computer system simulators are major tools used by architecture researchers. Two key elements play a role in the credibility of simulator results: (1) the simulator's accuracy, and (2) the quality of the baseline architecture. Some simulators, such as gem5, already provide highly accurate parameterized models. However, finding the right values for all these parameters to faithfully model a real architecture is still a problem. In this paper, we calibrate the memory hierarchy of an in-order core gem5 simulation to accurately model a real mobile Arm SoC. We execute small programs, which we design to stress specific parts of the memory system, to deduce key parameter values for the model. We compare the execution of SPEC CPU2006 benchmarks on the real hardware with the gem5 simulation. Our results show that our calibration reduces the average and worst-case IPC error by 36 % and 50%, respectively, when compared with a gem5 simulation configured with the default parameters.