The Programmer’s View models of processors and devices work at a level where functional behavior is equivalent to what you would see if you were using real hardware. Timing accuracy is sacrificed to achieve fast simulation execution speeds. This means that you can use the PV models for confirming software functionality, but you must not rely on the accuracy of cycle counts, low-level component interactions, or other hardware-specific behavior.

The major components are:

Some components are software implementations of specific hardware functionality. Components based on PrimeCells are an example. Other components are necessary as part of the modeling environment and do not represent hardware. Examples of the latter category of component are the bus, clock, telnet and visualization components.

Components based on specific hardware functionality may be provided as either: