How does PTLsim compare to SimpleScalar?
PTLsim is not related to SimpleScalar, an older simulation infrastructure still widely used in the academic research community despite its numerous shortcomings. One of the main motivations for developing PTLsim (beyond support of the x86 instruction set) was to avoid the inaccurate microarchitectural model and performance problems inherent in SimpleScalar’s design. PTLsim is typically significantly faster than SimpleScalar 4.x (often 5 to 10 times faster, in terms of simulated cycles per second) on the same hardware, compiler and workload due to its unique design.
