Ampere open-sources Panthera, an industrial-grade CPU performance model built before the AI era
Ampere has released Panthera, a cycle-accurate performance model its architecture team uses to explore CPU features and microarchitectural tradeoffs. Built over eight years and 6,000 commits by 45 people, it models AmpereOne and later cores. Because AmpereOne runs in major clouds, researchers can now validate the model against real production silicon instead of academic simulators. Ampere calls it "low-background steel" for computer systems: human-authored code free of generative-AI influence.
In that same spirit, Panthera represents low-background steel for computer systems.
- UncleOxidant
> Panthera represents low-background steel for computer systems. It is an end-to-end, industrial-grade performance model conceived, designed, and hand-crafted entirely by human architects before the era of generative AI. This repository represents over 8 years of work and 6000 individual git commits by 45 people. By making this human-authored codebase public, we hope it serves as a trusted, high-watermark reference for human engineers and future automated hardware-modeling tools alike.
- mathisfun123
This is a cycle accurate simulator. It takes a list of instructions and simulates how long it would take to actually execute those instructions. In addition it keeps track of counters for various things (cache misses, interrupts, etc). Correlation refers to making sure the counter values reported by the sim are within some ballpark of the same values on a real chip. Cycle accurate sims are used for architecture research (trying out new features) as well as pre-silicon software work - chip isn't taped out but you want to start building a compiler. They are generally very slow (1000x slower than running on device) because they are generally written by HW people who have no idea how to write fast code. I would be interested to know how fast this one is.
- wmf
Too bad they can't use this to design a high performance core.