A method for simulating a set of instructions to be executed on a processor including performing a performance simulation of the processor over a number of simulation cycles. Modeling, in a frontend component, branch prediction and instruction cache is performed providing instructions to the instruction window, and modeling of an instruction window for the cycle is performed. From the simulation, a performance parameter of the processor is obtained without modeling a reorder buffer, issue queue(s), register renaming, load-store queue(s) and other buffers of the processor.