The modeled scope could be only one microprocessor or the whole computer system.
Detail: functional vs. timing(performance) simulators
...
input(workload): trace-driven(event-driven) vs execution-driven
trace-driven:
Trace driven simulation is getting the actual data from a real experiment and feeding it to the simulation. The disadvantage is every time the experiment has to be done which is a tedious job, advantage is absolute results.
event-driven:
Memory hierarchy simulator returns simulated time information to reference generator, which is used to schedule simulated processes.
Reference:http://www.cs.berkeley.edu/~culler/cs258-s99/slides/lec08/sld028.htm
Reference:http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Computer_architecture_simulator
