Intel Microcomputer Research Lab (MRL) is engaged in a project to build a software-based PC platform simulator that is complete and accurate enough to boot and run Windows NT. Our design goals emphasize both extensibility and speed. Extensibility -- the ability to add with ease new software models of platform components and devices -- is essential to keeping up with the vast and ever-growing assortment of PC platform hardware. We hope to achieve speed via a multi-threaded simulator kernel, which assigns a thread of control to each platform component model, thus enabling each model to run concurrently on an MP host. Synchronization between models is based on abstractions which have been designed to be simple and intuative for a hardware-device modeller to use. The resulting system will be used for the design of platform devices, processors and chipsets, for pre-silicon NT device-driver debugging, and for NT/hardware performance tuning.

Richard Uhlig / Intel Microcomputer Research Lab, Oregon |
ruhlig@ichips.intel.com 2111 N.E. 25th Avenue |
Hillsboro, OR 97124-5961 |
(503) 264-1672 (work) Mail Stop: JF3-359 |
(503) 264-7902 (facs) Location: JF3/H10, 3rd floor |