Commercial processing workload
Commercial Processing Workload , or CPW for short, is a unit of measurement made by the computer manufacturer IBM to make the performance of its System i5 (formerly AS / 400) series of computers comparable.
The CPW is a transaction benchmark modified by IBM, similar to that of the Transaction Processing Performance Council, somewhat specialized in the area of application of these computers (mainly commercial transactions in large quantities).
The unit "1 CPW" was defined for the performance of an IBM AS / 400 B10 system with 16 MB main memory and 800 MB hard disk space. Users were simulated until about 70% processor utilization was reached. The number of transactions was set equal to "1 CPW".
Thus one can determine (quite linearly and roughly) that a system with 10 CPW can either serve ten times the number of users with the same response time, or with the same number of users the response time is reduced to a tenth.
In general, this information should always be treated with a certain degree of caution, because the system performance does not only depend on the speed of the processor. In order to actually achieve the CPW value, one should make sure that the remaining equipment of the system (IO subsystem, hard disks, main memory, etc.) is appropriate to the performance of the CPU.