A Virtual Year

A while after I woke up my laptop today, I realized that the fan was pretty noisy. That typically indicates that the processor is working busy on something, and then I spotted Simics in the task bar. Checking in on that Simics showed that it was indeed running, and pausing it did lower the load on machine to the point that the fans calmed down. Turned out that while I was doing other things, Simics had been busily simulating away on one of my cores. Indeed, it had simulated what was almost a complete year.

As you can see on the right, the time indicator in the Simics control window shows that the target had executed for 7988 hours. That is close to 333 days, which is pretty close to a year.

This was achieved in about 4 hours and 20 minutes of host time. Simics was moving time forwards about 1800 times faster than real time. Just how can that be?

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