Performance Characteristics of Cross-Architecture Execution in Mixed-ISA Environments

Abstract

Cross-architecture execution remains an important technique for maintaining software compatibility in heterogeneous data centers. However, reported performance results are often based on isolated benchmarks and do not fully reflect long-term system behavior. An experimental platform consisting of six x86-64 servers and four ARMv8 nodes was constructed to evaluate full-system binary translation under continuous workloads. A Linux guest environment was deployed to execute SPEC CPU2017 and PARSEC benchmarks compiled for ARM. Runtime traces were collected over 72-hour test cycles. Measurements show that translation cache misses account for 18%–27% of total execution overhead, while page synchronization contributes an additional 11% on average. After introducing region clustering and deferred exception handling, average execution time was reduced by 14.6% on integer workloads and 21.3% on floating-point workloads. The results indicate that memory interaction patterns play a dominant role in long-running cross-ISA deployments.