The Midlifekicker Microarchitecture Evaluation Metric

We introduce the midlfekicker metric for evaluating microarchitectures mostly during the design process. We assume a microarchitecture designed at a time T-1 and estimate if a new microarchitecture projected for time T has advantages over the microarchitecture designed at T-1 and remapped on the same technology at time T. We consider that microarchitects minimize the product cycles per instruction (CPI) x cycle time and estimate performance based on CPI with a soft-threshold to include cycle time product effects. Some measurements are also reported.