It is a tool for modeling the design and behavior of a microprocessor and its components, such as the ALU, cache memory, control unit, and data path, among others.
In addition, the simulation also enables educators to teach computer organization and architecture courses with hand-on experiences.
While a trace-driven simulation is known to be comparatively fast and its results are highly reproducible, it also requires a very large storage space.
For instance, simulating a microprocessor with thousand of cores along with multiple levels of cache memory incurs very little cost when comparing with the fabrication of a prototyping chip.
As the semester progresses, additional features, such as instruction pipelining, register renaming, reservation stations, out-of-order execution, and scoreboarding, can be modeled and added to the simulator as they are introduced in the classroom.