A Measure of Transaction Processing 20 Years Later

This article quantifies the price-performance improvements on two standard commercial benchmarks (DebitCredit and Sort) from 1985 to 2005. It shows that improvement has exceeded Moore’s law – largely due to (1) hardware improvements, (2) software improvements, (3) massive parallelism, and (4) changing from mainframe to commodity economics. Price-performance continues to improve faster than Moore’s law but per-processor and peak performance are improving more slowly. The sorting results in particular indicate little progress on per-processor speed in the last decade (probably due to slow improvement in memory bandwidth) and little overall progress since 2000 (when thousands of processors and disks were first used).