Accuracy of Saturn CPU emulators

[ldesnogu]

(01-29-2020 06:29 AM)cyrille de brébisson Wrote:  Cool, where do you work?

I work at ARM.

Quote:Do you have to also do the GPU?
How important is cycle accuracy in our modern age of cache and cachemiss? is it really possible to be cycle accurate?
Also, there is buss sharing with periferials that can cause the buss to be buzzy at random times. Are you emulating this also?
In other terms are you doing a bull SOC emulator, or just the core CPU?

My team only deals with CPU, that's enough work Every tiny detail is simulated: pipeline, reorder buffer, caches, hardware prefetchers, bus contentions, etc. We use these models to design next generation CPUs so cycle accuracy is paramount to take a decision.

Quote:>And x86, no way, never. That's the most horrible instruction set I ever had the displeasure to use.
Not even talking about the 64 bit extentions!

I find x86-64 more readable though quite far from RISC processors or m68k. But implementing all of x86-64 would be crazy, there are piles of old stuff that still have to be supported (16-bit mode, come on).

Back to the subject, I'd like to write a Saturn emulator for ARM for the fun of it. I wanted to write it for HP Prime Cortex-A7 but I found that alas I can't run native programs on the G2 without opening it