AMD SimNow

[Mark Jones]

The SimNow™ simulator is a fast and configurable x86 and AMD64 dynamically-translating instruction-level platform simulator. With SimNow users can connect complex software models to form a PC platform emulation environment. SimNow™ emulates AMD Athlon™ 64 and AMD Opteron™ uniprocessor and multiprocessor based systems that run several commercial operating systems and applications. Specifically, AMD and its partners use SimNow™ for:

    * BIOS and device driver development.
    * Prototyping software visible architectural changes.
    * Non-intrusive and deterministic measurement and testing of software at the instruction-level.
    * Modeling of future platform tradeoffs for correctness and performance analysis.

The simulator contains all the classic pieces of a PC system (CPU, memory, Northbridge, Southbridge, display, IDE drives, floppy, keyboard, and mouse support). Images (hard disk, DVD/CD-ROM, and floppy) can be created in custom sizes with the DiskTool program that is provided with the simulator. A simulation can be saved at any point in the simulation to a media file, from which the simulation can be re-run at a later time.

---> http://developer.amd.com/cpu/simnow/Pages/default.aspx <---