An instruction-level performance analysis of the Multiflow TRACE 14/300

Abstract

Advances in compiler technology have recently led to the introduction of a new architectural paradigm, called the Very Long Instruction Word (VLIW) architecture. The Multijlow TRACE series of processors is the jirst commercial line of processors wv”th this architecture. Information on the performance of the TRACE is of sigtujicant value to the design of all processors intended to exploit jine-grain parallelism. This paper presents results concerning the performance and resource utilization of the TRACE 14/300 on a set of 11 common scienti~c programs written in both C and FORTRAN. Several characteristics of the application, architecture, implementation, and compiler that contribute to the observed results are identified. Performance of the TRACE 14/300 is also measured on several standard benchmarks, including the SPEC benchmark suite. Comparisons are made with results from other processors. The architectural effectiveness of the TRACE 141300 appears to be better than most existing RISC workstations and is comparable to the best current superscalar workstations.