An abstract hardware/software model for early performance evaluation

To address the separation between the hardware and software domains, this paper presents an abstract hardware/software model employing unified representation. The model supports early hardware/software evaluation and trade-off exploration. In addition, systems can be evaluated at different levels of detail, allowing those aspects of interest to be focused on. The benefits of a unified representation are also discussed. Some examples are presented to illustrate the abstract hardware/software model and demonstrate the concepts and ideas embodied in the paper.