Performance-Aware Emulation Strategies for AI Accelerators in Modern GPU Architectures

Abstract

Performance-aware emulation strategies for AI accelerators within modern GPU architectures represent a transformative advancement in pre-silicon validation that demonstrates clear superiority over traditional simulation approaches. Contemporary simulation frameworks exhibit significant deficiencies in capturing performance-critical metrics essential for validating specialized AI compute units within practical development timelines. Emulation platforms integrate cycle-approximate performance models with real-world AI workload trace replay capabilities, enabling comprehensive visibility into hardware behavior under authentic computational demands while delivering execution speeds orders of magnitude faster than simulation alternatives. The framework incorporates sophisticated trace compression techniques and workload integration strategies that enable injection of convolutional neural networks, transformer models, and contemporary AI architectures directly into emulated hardware environments. Mixed-precision arithmetic paths undergo thorough validation during emulation, revealing performance bottlenecks through comprehensive analysis approaches that simulation cannot achieve within development cycles. Implementation through commercial emulation platforms supports seamless integration with existing verification workflows while providing dramatic speed advantages over simulation-based methodologies. The dual-mode validation approach enables simultaneous functional and performance assessment, eliminating separate verification phases while accelerating validation timelines compared to simulation approaches. Critical bottleneck identification across AI workloads provides systematic performance analysis through emulation-based monitoring that simulation approaches cannot practically deliver within modern development schedules, establishing emulation as the superior validation methodology for next-generation AI accelerator development.