In “Virtual prototyping and performance analysis of two memory architectures,” Hudas Muhammad of Schulmberger Corp. and Assim Sagahyroon of the American University of Sharjah,  UAE, make use of simulation platforms developed with the the Mirabilis VisualSim tool to compare the performance of two memory architectures, namely, the Direct Connect architecture of the Opteron, and the Shared Bus of the Xeon multicore processors.

They have found variations exist between the two memory architectures, that call for the early use of virtual system prototyping and simulation techniques to assess performance at an early stage in the design cycle.