Talk:Computer architecture simulator

Merge of Full system simulator

• There's a large overlap between these articles (examples included). The "full" article should just be a section here. Pcap ping 22:23, 23 April 2010 (UTC)
• I don't know exactly what a "computer architecture simulator" is, but the full system simulator is well defined, and correctly so in the article, as a simulator of an electronic system that is capable of running "full" workloads. Historically in computer architecture, design decisions were almost entirely based on running very specific workloads. Various research discovered that this was misguided - that "real" systems were running very different workloads. Most obvious was the distinction between scientific (compute intensive) vs database (data intensive). The problem was that simulators generally would only model the processor core and some minimum of electronics around it, disallowing running of proper stacks of software (e.g. OS, middleware, services, etc etc). In the late 80s and early 90s, therefore, an effort was made to figure out how to accurately and efficiently model a "full" (or "complete") system. Once this was accomplished in the mid-to-late 90s, it was also discovered that this same tool had much broader uses than just computer architecture - notably, software development and test. As these uses developed, the emphasis of timing accuracy was diminished, further differentiating full system simulation from earlier computer simulation techniques. --Psm (talk) 07:21, 11 May 2010 (UTC)