Comparing and contrasting a commercial OLTP workload with CPU2000 on IPF

With the recent introduction of Itanium Processor Family (IPF) microprocessors for enterprise servers it is imperative to understand the behavior of server class applications. This paper analyzes the behavior of the Oracle Database Benchmark (ODB), an online transaction processing (OLTP) workload, and compares it with SPEC CPU2000. This study examines code mix, instruction and data supply, and value locality. The results show that while IPF's bundle constraints cause a large injection of NOPs into the code stream, IPFs register stack engine successfully reduces the number of memory operations by nearly 50%. The control-flow predictability of ODB is better than CPU2000, in spite of ODB's large active branch footprint. Due to ODB's large memory footprint, cache misses (particularly instruction cache misses) are a much more serious problem than in CPU2000.