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Here is the statement from my textbook that made me confused as to what "instruction profile" meant:

"...new peripheral devices constantly change the nature of the demand on the system in terms of typical instruction profile and the data access patterns."" - Computer Organization and Architecture: Designing for Performance 10th edition

When searching around for a definition for instruction profile, I wasn't able to find one. I found results for instructional profiles which are used in teaching/pedagogy, a pdf showing a graph that used the term instructional profile but seemed to not be in computing, but not a definition for instruction profile.

Job Paulson
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In this context, it is likely that instruction profile means the types, variety, and organisation (the 'profile') of machine-code instructions being executed on the device.

It isn't a term I have heard before, and one I doubt will suddenly jump into mainstream use, but it is really just saying "new peripherals mean that the types of code running on computers is becoming ever more varied".

John
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    Agreed on the meaning here. I think it's not a standard technical term, just a use of the common English word "profile" to talk about qualitative differences in the kinds of instruction sequences (traces) that will be executed, both in terms of instruction mix (e.g. ALU vs. branch vs. load/store) and the dependency patterns between them. – Peter Cordes Jan 23 '23 at 22:24