Performance Characterization of Itanium® 2-Based Montecito Processor

This paper presents the performance characteristics of the Intel®Itanium®2-based Montecito processor and compares its performance to the previous generation Madison processor. Measurements on both are done using the industry-standard SPEC CPU2006 benchmarks. The benchmarks were compiled using the Intel Fortran/C++ optimizing compiler and run using the reference data sets. We analyze a large set of processor parameters such as cache misses, TLB misses, branch prediction, bus transactions, resource and data stalls and instruction frequencies. Montecito achieves 1.14× and 1.16× higher (geometric mean) IPC on integer and floating-point applications. We believe that the results and analysis presented in this paper can potentially guide future IA-64 compiler and architectural research.