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A Characterization of Processor Performance in the vax-11/780

Authors:

Douglas W. ClarkAuthors Info & Claims

ISCA '84: Proceedings of the 11th annual international symposium on Computer architecture

Pages 301 - 310

https://doi.org/10.1145/800015.808199

Published: 01 January 1984 Publication History

Abstract

This paper reports the results of a study of VAX-11/780 processor performance using a novel hardware monitoring technique. A micro-PC histogram monitor was built for these measurements. It keeps a count of the number of microcode cycles executed at each microcode location. Measurement experiments were performed on live timesharing workloads as well as on synthetic workloads of several types. The histogram counts allow the calculation of the frequency of various architectural events, such as the frequency of different types of opcodes and operand specifiers, as well as the frequency of some implementation-specific events, such as translation buffer misses. The measurement technique also yields the amount of processing time spent in various activities, such as ordinary microcode computation, memory management, and processor stalls of different kinds. This, paper reports in detail the amount of time the “average” VAX instruction spends in these activities.

References

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Clark, D.W. Cache Performance in the VAX-11/780. ACM TOCS 1, 1 (Feb. 1983), pp. 24-37.

Digital Library

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Clark, D.W. and Emer, J.S. Performance of the VAX-11/780 Translation Buffer: Simulation and Measurement. Submitted for publication, Nov. 1983.

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Clark, D.W. and Levy, H.M., Measurement and Analysis of Instruction Use in the VAX-11/780. Proc. 9th Annual Symp. on Comp. Arch., Austin, April 1982, pp. 9-17.

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Index Terms

A Characterization of Processor Performance in the vax-11/780
1. Computer systems organization
  1. Architectures
    1. Serial architectures
      1. Pipeline computing
2. General and reference
  1. Cross-computing tools and techniques
    1. Measurement
    2. Metrics

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Published In

cover image ACM Conferences

ISCA '84: Proceedings of the 11th annual international symposium on Computer architecture

January 1984

373 pages

ISBN:0818605383

DOI:10.1145/800015

Chairman:
Dharma P. Agrawal

ACM SIGARCH Computer Architecture News Volume 12, Issue 3
June 1984
348 pages
ISSN:0163-5964
DOI:10.1145/773453
Issue’s Table of Contents

Copyright © 1984 Authors.

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Association for Computing Machinery

New York, NY, United States

Publication History

Published: 01 January 1984

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