References

Below stands a list (non exhaustive !) of similar projects found on the Web :

• Wine
• VMWare
• Bochs
• QEMU
• Simple Scalar
• SESC

Some interesting articles you might want to read too :

English:

• THE MICROARCHITECTURE OF INTEL AND AMD CPU’S: AN OPTIMIZATION GUIDE FOR ASSEMBLY PROGRAMMERS AND COMPILER MAKERS

http://www.agner.org/optimize/microarchitecture.pdf

• ON THE POWER OF SIMPLE BRANCH PREDICTION ANALYSIS
  (Cryptology ePrint Archive, Report 2006/351)

http://eprint.iacr.org/2006/351.pdf

French:

• PEUT-ON CASSER UNE CLÉ DE CRYPTAGE EN QUELQUES MILLISECONDES ?

http://www.futura-sciences.com/news-peut-on-casser-cle-cryptage-quelques-millisecondes_10064.php

• http://sid.rstack.org/blog/index.php/2006/11/22/152-la-fin-du-monde

And more to come ...