AMD Basic Performance Measurements for Athlon 64 252C Opteron and Phenom Processors. [2008-09-25] free download

File name Basic Performance Measurements for AMD Athlon 64_252C AMD Opteron and AMD Phenom Processors. [2008-0

Basic Performance Measurements for AMD AthlonTM 64, AMD OpteronTM and AMD PhenomTM Processors Paul J. Drongowski AMD CodeAnalystTM Performance Analyzer Development Team Advanced Micro Devices, Inc. Boston Design Center 25 September 2008 1. Introduction. Good performance is crucial to many applications. Program performance tuning is a multifaceted activity grounded in measurement and analysis. Measurement provides an objective basis for assessment and comparison of the performance aspects of program design and implementation. AMD processors offer extensive features to enable performance measurement. These features use hardware counters to measure performance-related events caused by user- or kernel-level software. Event counts help a systems engineer or software developer to identify the likely cause of a performance issue. The purpose of this technical note is to describe a collection of basic measurements that engineers and developers can take using the performance monitoring features of AthlonTM 64, AMD OpteronTM, and AMD PhenomTM processors. Section 2 recommends online resources describing processor-specific microarchitecture, performance events, and performance analysis tools. Section 3 provides background information about the measurement technique called "performance counter sampling." Section 4 describes the performance measurements. Section 5 illustrates the use of a few common measurements. 2. Resources. A number of on-line resources are available to assist engineers with performance measurement, analysis, and improvement. Find these resources, and many more, at AMD Developer Central: http://developer.amd.com Performance measurement hardware and events are described in the "BIOS and Kernel Developer's Guide," or BKDG. The BKDG is the main resource for details about hardware events and what they measure. These details include important information about conditions affecting event counts (i.e., what is (and is not) included in an event count). The BKDG also describes how to configure the "unit masks" associated with each event to narrow measurement to more specific hardware conditions. AMD publishes a version of the BKDG for each processor family. Find information about performance events supported by quad-core AMD Opteron and AMD Phenom processors in the "BIOS and Kernel Developer's Guide for AMD Family 10h Processors," Publication #31116: http://www.amd.com/us-en/assets/content_type/white_papers_and_tech_docs/31116.pdf 1