“…Thus, many authors [3]- [8] employ SimPoint [2], which defines application-specific simulation intervals, whereas other authors [9]- [12] choose to perform an initial fast forwarding or warm up of a determined number of instructions followed by a detailed simulation of a fixed number of subsequent instructions (both processes -forwarding and detailed simulation-are not application-specific and imply the same number of instructions for all evaluated benchmarks). This diversity also exists in the simulator employed (gem5 [13] in [4], [5], [7], [11], [14], Sniper [15] in [9], [16], or Scarab [17] in [6], [18], among others), the benchmarks used and the input data these applications receive (e.g., in the case of SPEC CPU suites, reference inputs in [3], [4], [7], [18], [19], test inputs in [16] or train inputs in [20]). Our motivational hypothesis in this work is that the particular simulation window employed when evaluating microarchitectural proposals related to the last level cache (LLC), such as cache replacement policies, can lead to incorrect conclusions.…”