Measurement and analysis of instruction use in the VAX-11/780

ABSTRACT

This paper reports measurements of instruction set use on the VAX-11/780 computer. A hardware monitor was used to measure the frequency and time taken by each VAX instruction. Data from benchmark programs, a compiler, a linker, and a synthetic timesharing workload are reported. Results show that although some programs rely on a small set of instructions, different applications use the instruction set in different ways.

REFERENCES

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INDEX TERMS

Primary Classification:
  C. Computer Systems Organization
  C.1 PROCESSOR ARCHITECTURES
      C.1.2 Multiple Data Stream Architectures (Multiprocessors)

          Nouns: VAX

Additional Classification:
  B. Hardware
  B.1 CONTROL STRUCTURES AND MICROPROGRAMMING
      B.1.5 Microcode Applications
          Subjects: Instruction set interpretation

  D. Software
  D.4 OPERATING SYSTEMS

General Terms:
Design