Feasibility of Combined Area and Performance Optimization for Superscalar Processors Using Random Search

When designing embedded systems, one needs to make decisions concerning the different components that will be included in a microprocessor. An important issue is the chip area vs. performance trade-off. In this paper the authors investigate the relationship between chip area and performance for superscalar microprocessors. The authors investigate the feasibility to obtain a suitable configuration by searching. The authors show that the approach gives a good configuration after 100 to 150 iterations using a simple random search algorithm. This shows the feasibility of the approach, in particular when more sophisticated search algorithms are employed as we plan in future work