> Assuming these traces were typical could lead architecture designers to optimize for cases found more rarely in commercial computing workloads. At the time I

> Assuming these traces were typical could lead architecture designers to optimize for cases found more rarely in commercial computing workloads. At the time Itanium was actively being pushed by Intel I was working for a company building content creation software. Intel was very interested in us porting to Itanium and provided considerable help to that effort. One of the big reasons was that they were interested in being able to see the traces, precisely for the reason you state - most of their existing test code was not representative of typical large scale commercial software. We got it running but never released it - the binaries were huge (3x x86) which was a big issue back then, and the performance just wasn't there.