A measurement study of memory transaction characteristics on a PowerPC-based Macintosh

Abstract

Address traces are acquired typically in order to evaluate different cache organizations and memory hierarchy designs. Address traces have other uses, however. For example, traces can provide information about patterns of different types of memory accesses (e.g. reads versus writes). If the trace data includes time stamps, bursts of accesses can be detected and analyzed. This paper describes a series of studies performed on a PowerPC based Macintosh computer to examine memory transaction behavior using time stamped address traces. The measurement setups and workloads are described, along with a description of the results obtained.