Hardware density of Heterogeneous simulation
How much time software accesses hardware?
Hardware density depends on applications and with in an application.
In loosely coupled CPU system, the block responsible for hardware initializations has 30% instructions to access the hardware.
In tightly coupled system, every memory reference could go through simulated hardware.
In general hardware density is important for simulation speed.
The base hardware and tools that communicate between the heterogenous environment can attribute to the speed too.
If simulation is distributive (most often it happens these days), the network bandwidth, reliability and speed matters too