Gem5 system requirements for decent performance

Question

I have to work with gem5 for my project but was wondering that what hardware configuration i should buy. I owned a "good enough" laptop but sadly it's no longer working reliably, so i would have to stick to some lower end laptop. What minimum priced processor i should buy? Also AMD or Intel? Can't afford an apple laptop either. Any help is deeply appreciated

Answer 1

To give you an idea, I have high end Lenovo P51 laptop with:

• Intel Core i7-7820HQ Processor (8MB Cache, up to 3.90GHz) (4 cores 8 threads)
• 32GB(16+16) DDR4 2400MHz SODIMM
• 512GB SSD PCIe TLC OPAL2
• Ubuntu 17.10

Then the build time for:

git checkout da79d6c6cde0fbe5473ce868c9be4771160a003b
CC=gcc-6 CXX=g++-6 scons -j"$(nproc)" --ignore-style build/ARM/gem5.opt

is 10 minutes which I consider reasonable.

And a minimalistic ARM Buildroot Linux kernel boot takes:

• 1 minute 40 seconds on the default simplified AtomicSimpleCPU
• 10 minutes on the much more realistic --cpu-type=HPI --caches

This laptop is likely more expensive than most Apple laptops however at 2500 dollars. But you are going to be developing professionally, it is a worthy investment.

For hobbyist use however, a midend 1200 dollar laptop should be good enough to get started I believe, considering that:

• you won't build from scratch very often, mostly incrementally with scons

• you can boot with a simple and fast CPU, make a checkpoint with m5 checkpoint before your benchmark, then restore the checkpoint with a more realistic and slower CPU model: How to switch CPU models in gem5 after restoring a checkpoint and then observe the difference?