MICRO's evaluation culture is instrument-centric: the community knows exactly what each measurement tool can and cannot prove, and reviewers score the match between claim and instrument before they look at the numbers.
| Instrument | Proves | Cannot prove | Typical tools |
|---|---|---|---|
| Analytical / trace model | First-order potential, limit studies | Interaction effects, timing | custom, trace-driven models |
| Cycle-level simulation | Relative performance of mechanisms | Absolute wall-clock, physical cost | gem5, ChampSim, Sniper, Ramulator/DRAMsim3 |
| Power/area models on top of sim | Energy and area trends | Sign-off-quality numbers | McPAT, CACTI, Accelergy |
| RTL + synthesis | Timing closure, real area/power at a node | Full-system performance | Verilog/Chisel + synthesis flow |
| FPGA prototype | Functional correctness at scale, OS interaction | ASIC frequency/power | FireSim, custom boards |
| Silicon measurement | Everything, for that one chip | Generality across designs | perf counters, power rails |
Rule: claim one rung below your strongest instrument. Cycle-level simulation plus McPAT supports "reduces memory-stall cycles by X% with ~Y mm² estimated overhead"; it does not support "improves datacenter TCO." The lineage here is the venue's own: CACTI 6.0 (MICRO 2007) and McPAT (MICRO 2009) were published at MICRO precisely because the community polices modeling fidelity.
# the only defensible summary statistic for speedups
from math import prod
def geomean(xs):
return prod(xs) ** (1.0 / len(xs))
speedups = per_workload_ipc_new / per_workload_ipc_base # elementwise
print(f"geomean {geomean(list(speedups)):.3f}, "
f"min {min(speedups):.3f} ({worst_workload}), "
f"regressions: {(speedups < 1.0).sum()} of {len(speedups)}")
Every design decision named in the mechanism section owes the evaluation section a figure or table row:
Two credibility checks reviewers apply that authors often skip:
For multicore results, disclose how heterogeneity was handled: mix construction rule, per-mix repetitions, and whether throughput is weighted speedup, harmonic mean, or raw IPC sum — each answers a different question and reviewers check that the metric matches the claim (fairness claims need a fairness metric).
[Instrument] <rung used> — claim height matches: yes / no (quote the overclaim)
[Baseline strength] product-like config / best-prior reimplemented / oracle bound /
iso-storage check: present-absent each
[Workloads] suite + subset rule + sampling disclosure: complete / gaps listed
[Summary stats] per-workload + geomean + regression count: yes / no
[Ablations] each mechanism component covered: list of unablated components
[Sensitivity] parameters swept vs parameters hardcoded
[Overheads] storage / area / power / latency / energy: quantified-missing each