Evaluation of software performance on a given cus- tomized embedded processor is an important step in the design space exploration of embedded system architec- tures. Such evaluations help system designers in taking early design decisions regarding the hardware architec- ture most suitable for the target application. Simulation based performance evaluations, although very accurate, can be prohibitively slower. In this paper, we present a novel hybrid approach consisting of an initial simula- tion run (one time) followed by analysis of intermedi- ate level (IR) application code by an evaluation engine. Our results show that the evaluation engine can accu- rately (more than 95%) estimate the excecution cycles of application or application task on a given customized embedded processor while it is at least an order of mag- nitude faster in terms of time taken.