We developed a 1.3-GHz SPARC-V9 processor: the SPARC64 V. This processor is designed to address requirements for enterprise servers and high-performance computing. Processing speed under multiuser interactive workloads is very sensitive to system balance because of the large number of memory requests included. From many years of experience with such workloads in mainframe system developments, we give importance to design a well-balanced communication structure. To accomplish this task, a system-level performance study must begin at an early please. Therefore we developed a performance model, which consists of a detailed processor model and detailed memory model, before hardware design was started. We updated it continuously. Once a logic simulator became available, we used it to verify the performance model for improving its accuracy. The model quite effectively enabled us to achieve performance goals and finish development quickly. This paper describes the SPARC64 V microarchitecture and performance analyses for hardware design.

During the development of high-performance processors, software performance models are used to obtain performance estimates. These models are not cycle-accurate, so their results can have significant errors, leading to performance surprises after the hardware is built. Some performance tests can run directly on the logic simulators, to get more accurate results, but those simulators cannot run large interactive workloads with I/O and much operating system code. So the accurate performance estimates from logic simulators are only available for application code, and are not adequate for the evaluation of powerful server systems that are primarily intended to run large interactive workloads. We discuss a software tool system, the "Reverse Tracer", that generates executable performance tests from an instruction trace of the workload. The generated performance tests retain the essential performance characteristics of multi-user I/O-intensive workloads without doing any real I/O, so they can run in logic simulation to measure performance accurately before the hardware is built.