- ISA emulation — x86/x86-64 instruction execution.
- Microarchitecture simulation — pipelines, caches, branch predictors, execution ports, etc.
- System emulation — CPU + chipset + PCI + RAM + firmware.
- Cycle/trace simulation — much slower, but useful for architectural research.
CPU EMPORIUM
Intel — x86 lineage
I’d build the Intel wing chronologically:
8086
- 8086
- 8088
80186
80286
80386
- 386DX
- 386SX
80486
- 486DX
- 486SX
- 486DX2
- 486DX4
Pentium
- P5
- P54C
- P55C / MMX
Pentium Pro
- P6
Pentium II
- Klamath
- Deschutes
Pentium III
- Katmai
- Coppermine
- Tualatin
Pentium 4
- Willamette
- Northwood
- Prescott
Pentium M
- Banias
- Dothan
Core
- Yonah
- Conroe
- Merom
- Penryn
Nehalem
- Bloomfield
- Lynnfield
- Westmere
Sandy Bridge
Ivy Bridge
Haswell
Broadwell
Skylake
Kaby Lake
Coffee Lake
Comet Lake
Ice Lake
Tiger Lake
Alder Lake
Raptor Lake
Meteor Lake
Arrow Lake
Lunar Lake
For the actual emulator collection, you don’t necessarily need one emulator per SKU. You want representative microarchitectures.
AMD — x86 lineage
K5
- AMD K5
K6
- K6
- K6-2
- K6-III
K7
This is a particularly important room:
- Athlon
- Athlon Classic
- Thunderbird
- Duron
K8
Hammer architecture
- Athlon 64
- Opteron
- Turion 64
This introduces AMD64 and the integrated memory controller.
K10
- Phenom
- Phenom II
- Opteron
Bulldozer
- Bulldozer
- Piledriver
- Steamroller
- Excavator
This deserves its own architectural simulator because of the unusual clustered/threaded design.
Zen
Then the modern AMD wing:
Zen 1
Zen 2
Zen 3
Zen 4
Zen 5
And server variants:
- EPYC Naples
- EPYC Rome
- EPYC Milan
- EPYC Genoa
- EPYC Bergamo
- EPYC Turin
Intel Xeon
This should be a separate server gallery, rather than just being mixed into desktop Intel.
Pentium II Xeon
Pentium III Xeon
Xeon NetBurst
Xeon 5000/7000
Xeon 5100
Xeon 5300
Xeon 5400
Xeon 5500
Nehalem-EP
Xeon E5
This is particularly relevant to your existing hardware:
- E5-2600
- E5-2600 v2
- E5-2600 v3
- E5-2600 v4
Representatives:
Westmere
↓
Sandy Bridge-EP
↓
Ivy Bridge-EP
↓
Haswell-EP
↓
Broadwell-EP
Then:
Xeon Scalable
- Skylake-SP
- Cascade Lake
- Cooper Lake
- Ice Lake-SP
- Sapphire Rapids
- Emerald Rapids
- Granite Rapids
- Sierra Forest
Xeon Phi
Absolutely.
And I wouldn’t bury this under “Intel CPU.”
It gets a giant separate laboratory.
Knights Corner
KNC
- Xeon Phi 5110P
- Xeon Phi 7120P
Architecture:
many x86-derived cores
│
├── wide vector units
├── local caches
└── ring interconnect
This is fascinating because it is neither a conventional CPU nor a conventional GPU.
Knights Landing
KNL
- Xeon Phi 7210
- 7230
- 7250
- 7290
Important features:
- many cores
- AVX-512
- MCDRAM
- mesh interconnect
- high-bandwidth memory modes
This is probably the single most interesting CPU-like machine to emulate if your goal is architectural experimentation.
Knights Mill
KNM
Deep-learning-oriented Xeon Phi.
ARM
If we’re building an emporium, I’d absolutely add ARM.
ARM1
ARM2
ARM6
ARM7
ARM9
ARM11
Cortex-A8
Cortex-A9
Cortex-A15
Cortex-A53
Cortex-A57
Cortex-A72
Cortex-A76
Neoverse
And then:
- ARMv7
- ARMv8-A
- ARMv9-A
RISC-V
This deserves a completely separate room because you can actually build the machines yourself.
Representatives:
- RV32I
- RV32IM
- RV64I
- RV64GC
- RV64GCV
Then more ambitious cores:
- Rocket
- BOOM
- CVA6
- XiangShan
This is where CPU emulation starts blending into CPU design research.
IBM / Power
Another very worthwhile wing:
- POWER3
- POWER4
- POWER5
- POWER6
- POWER7
- POWER8
- POWER9
- POWER10
And:
- PowerPC 601
- PowerPC 603
- PowerPC 604
- G3
- G4
- G5
MIPS
Classic emulation territory:
- MIPS I
- MIPS II
- MIPS III
- MIPS IV
- MIPS32
- MIPS64
Useful because of the clean RISC architecture.
SPARC
- SPARC V7
- SPARC V8
- SPARC V9
- UltraSPARC
- UltraSPARC II
- UltraSPARC III
- UltraSPARC IV
DEC
For the serious archaeology department:
- PDP-11
- VAX
- Alpha
Alpha deserves special attention:
- DEC Alpha 21064
- 21164
- 21264
- EV6
- EV7
It’s one of the great lost RISC architectures.
Transmeta
And if we’re going full mad-scientist museum:
- Crusoe
- Efficeon
These are particularly fascinating because the architecture involved code morphing.
Itanium
Absolutely:
- Itanium
- Itanium 2
- IA-64
This gives you an entirely different philosophy:
x86:
hardware discovers parallelism
IA-64:
compiler exposes parallelism
Very worthwhile as an architectural counterexample.
The emulator stack I’d actually build
I’d organize the CPU collection into four levels:
CPU EMPORIUM
│
┌──────────────┴──────────────┐
│ │
ISA EMULATION MICROARCH SIM
│ │
┌──────┼─────────┐ ┌────────┼────────┐
│ │ │ │ │ │
x86 ARM RISC-V caches OoO branch
│ │ │ │ │ │
└──────┴─────────┘ └────────┴────────┘
│
▼
SYSTEM EMULATION
│
┌─────────┼─────────┐
│ │ │
RAM PCI chipset
│ │ │
└─────────┼─────────┘
▼
BARE METAL
│
BIOS / ROM
│
REAL MACHINE
And for your particular collection, I’d prioritize:
Tier A — must-have
- 8086
- 80286
- 80386
- 80486
- Pentium
- Pentium Pro
- Pentium III
- Pentium 4
- Core 2
- Nehalem
- Sandy Bridge
- Haswell
- Skylake
- AMD K6
- Athlon/K7
- K8
- Phenom/K10
- Bulldozer
- Zen
- Zen 2
- Zen 3
- Zen 4
- Xeon Phi KNC
- Xeon Phi KNL
Tier B — architectural oddities
- Itanium
- Transmeta Crusoe
- Alpha
- POWER
- SPARC
- MIPS
- RISC-V
And I’d give Xeon Phi KNL a prominent place, because it bridges your original GPU-emulator concept and CPU-emulator concept beautifully:
x86 instruction semantics + many-core execution + AVX-512 + high-bandwidth memory + mesh topology.
That’s almost a perfect experimental “middle machine” between a conventional Xeon and a GPU.
