Exploiting Standard Deviation of CPI to Evaluate Architectural Time-Predictability

Time-predictability of computing is critical for hard real-time and safety-critical systems. However, currently there is no metric available to quantitatively evaluate time-predictability, a feature crucial to the design of time-predictable processors. This paper first proposes the concept of architectural time-predictability, which separates the time variation due to hardware architectural/microarchitectural design from that due to software. We then propose the standard deviation of clock cycles per instruction (CPI), a new metric, to measure architectural time-predictability. Our experiments confirm that the standard deviation of CPI is an effective metric to evaluate and compare architectural time-predictability for different processors. Category: Embedded computing