Abstract: Performance verification and evaluation is one of the most important and necessary key steps in the design and implementation of general-purpose processors. An efficient general-purpose processor prototype system performance evaluation method can not only help processor designers locate performance design defects as early as possible in the processor design stage, but also verify whether the processor can meet the performance design expectations before the design tape. However, it takes a long time to perform a complete performance test of the processor prototype system. Such a huge time overhead makes designers unable to perform performance design analysis in time, which causes the performance evaluation of the processor prototype system to become the bottleneck of the entire project. This paper proposes a fast and accurate performance evaluation method of general-purpose processor prototype systems: Proto-Perf. The Proto-Perf performance evaluation method uses the dynamic program analysis method and the basic block aggregation technology to extract the characteristic program fragments of the test program for testing, which significantly reduces the performance test time. The experimental results show that, compared with the performance data obtained by running the SPEC CPU2006 REF data scale test program completely, the absolute error of the performance data obtained by the Proto-Perf test is 1.53% on average, and the highest is 7.86%. At the same time, for each program in the experiment, the test time using the Proto-Perf method is significantly reduced. 

Key words: performance evaluation, verification, FPGA prototype system；general purpose processor