What is the difference between microarchitecture and architecture exploration?

A complementary activity is microarchitectural exploration which analyzes alternative ways of implementing the ISA in hardware. For example, alternative pipeline lengths, computational units and ways to protect memory may be assessed.

Both architectural and microarchitectural exploration can start with a description in an architectural language such as Codasip’s CodAL which allows the resources, encoding, semantics and microarchitecture to be described. A software toolchain can be generated from a CodAL description using Codasip’s Studio toolset. Similarly the CodAL description can be used to generate an RTL description of the microarchitecture.