Measurement and analysis of instruction use in the VAX-11/780
Douglas W. Clark, Henry M. Levy · ACM SIGARCH Computer Architecture News · 1982
This paper reports measurements of instruction set use on the VAX-11/780 computer. A hardware monitor was used to measure the frequency and time taken by each VAX instruction. Data from benchmark programs, a compiler, a linker, and a synthetic timesharing workload are reported. Results show that although some programs rely on a small set of instructions, different applications use the instruction set in different ways.