Performance Characterization of SPEC CPU Benchmarks on Intel's Core Microarchitecture based processor

The newly released CPU2006 benchmarks are long and have large data access footprint. In this paper we study the behavior of CPU2006 benchmarks on the newly released Intel's Woodcrest processor based on the Core microarchitecture. CPU2000 benchmarks, the predecessors of CPU2006 benchmarks, are also characterized to see if they both stress the system in the same way. Specifically, we compare the differences between the ability of SPEC CPU2000 and CPU2006 to stress areas traditionally shown to impact CPI such as branch prediction, first and second level caches and new unique features of the Woodcrest processor. The recently released Core microarchitecture based processors have many new features that help to increase the performance per watt rating. However, the impact of these features on various workloads has not been thoroughly studied. We use our results to analyze the impact of new feature called "Macro-fusion" on the SPEC Benchmarks. Macro-fusion reduces the run time and hence improves absolute performance. We found that although floating point benchmarks do not gain a lot from macro-fusion, it has a significant impact on a majority of the integer benchmarks.