BranchPredictor for aarch64

[GalKaptsenel]

Hello,

I am a researcher at the Technion working on Revizor (https://microsoft.github.io/sca-fuzzer).
For my research, I need a microarchitectural branch predictor simulator for AArch64.
Ideally, I am looking for an accurate microarchitectural simulation, but even a realistic approximation of a production-grade BPU would be extremely valuable.

I was wondering whether Gem5 can be used for this purpose.
Specifically, I would like to simulate only the branch predictor unit and extract low-level internal state information.

Any suggestions or guidance would be greatly appreciated.
Thank you!

[giactra]

Hi @GalKaptsenel,
We have several branch predictor models in gem5. You can find them in here.

To the best of my knowledge, no one has ever tried to run the branch predictor alone (for instance, by feeding it an input trace) without other uarch components. To achieve it you should probably sanitize the APIs to decouple the predictor algorithm from the rest of the system.

If you do that, it would be a contribution to gem5 we would all value a lot.

Alternatively, you can test your BPU by running a real benchmark with a gem5 CPU