The most common way to evaluate the
performance of a processor during DSE is to measure the execution time of many
popular benchmarks on cycle-accurate simulators. Here we employ renowned Simplescalar
[Austin et al. 2002] as the prototype simulator of a modern superscalar
microprocessor, which is run on a cluster with Intel Xeon processors. Each design
configuration considered in DSE, as shown in Table I, consists of 10 different design
parameters, and the total number of design configurations in the design space exceeds
70 million.