Performance characterization of the Alpha 21164 microprocessor using TP and SPEC workloads

Abstract

This paper compares the performance characteristics of the Alpha 21164 to the previous-generation 21064 microprocessor. Measurements on the 21164-based AlphaServer 8200 system are compared to the 21064-based DEC 7000 server using several commercial and technical workloads. The data analyzed includes cycles per instruction, multiple-issued instructions, branch predictions, stall components, cache misses, and instruction frequencies. The AlphaServer 8200 provides 2 to 3 times the performance of the DEC 7000 server based on the faster clock, larger on-chip cache, expanded multiple-issuing, and lower cache/memory latencies and higher bandwidth.