Instruction level profiling and evaluation of the IBM RS/6000

This paper reports preliminary results from using goblin, a new instruction level profiling system, to evaluate the IBM RISC System/6000 architecture. The evaluation presented is based on the SPEC benchmark suite. Each SPEC program (except gcc) is processed by goblin to produce an instrumented version. During execution of the instrumented program, profiling routines are invoked which trace the execution of the program. These routines also collect statistics on dynamic instruction mix, branching behavior, and resource utilization: Based on these statistics, the actual performance and the architectural efficiency of the RS/SOOO are evaluated. In order to provide a context for this evaluation, a comparison to the DECStation 3100 is also presented. The entire profiling and evaluation experiment on nine of the ten SPEC programs involves tracing and analyzing over 32 billion instructions on the RS/6000. The evaluation indicates that for the SPEC benchmark suite the architecture of the RS/6000 is well balanced and exhibits impressive performance, especially on the floating-point intensive applications.