Pre-Silicon RTL simulation is comprehensive and consequently infamous for being slow. During the development of Intel Atom processor, we created Surge, a new versatile mechanism to jumpstart the CPU core RTL simulation into any architectural boundary. Surge has many immediate benefits. First, the Pre-SI validation team can considerably shorten the total CPU simulation cycles by jumpstarting directly into the critical section of any test content. Second, Surge provides a more streamlined jumpstart to maximize efficiency for correlating Atom’s RTL performance data against our high-level performance model.