Transaction Performance vs. Moore’s Law: A Trend Analysis

Abstract

Intel co-founder Gordon E. Moore postulated in his famous 1965 paper that the number of components in integrated circuits had doubled every year from their invention in 1958 until 1965, and then predicted that the trend would continue for at least ten years. Later, David House, an Intel colleague, after factoring in the increase in performance of transistors, concluded that integrated circuits would double in performance every 18 months. Despite this trend in microprocessor improvements, your favored text editor continues to take the same time to start and your PC takes pretty much the same time to reboot as it took 10 years ago. Can this observation be made on systems supporting the fundamental aspects of our information based economy, namely transaction processing systems?

For over two decades the Transaction Processing Performance Council (TPC) has been very successful in disseminating objective and verifiable performance data to the industry. During this period the TPC’s flagship benchmark, TPC-C, which simulates Online Transaction Processing (OLTP) Systems has produced over 750 benchmark publications across a wide range of hardware and software platforms representing the evolution of transaction processing systems. TPC-C results have been published by over two dozen unique vendors and over a dozen database platforms, some of them exist, others went under or were acquired. But TPC-C survived. Using this large benchmark result set, we discuss a comparison of TPC-C performance and price-performance to Moore’s Law.

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