Performance counters and development of SPEC CPU2006

Abstract

Performance counters provide the means to track detailed events that occur on a CPU chip. These events are of interest to both performance analysts and compiler developers. Counting them provides essential clues to guide performance improvement. For example, a tester who sees that a program has a high cache miss rate on a particular system may experiment with compilation options that improve prefetching. A compiler developer who sees the same thing may realize that the code generator's machine model is missing some crucial detail of behavior on that particular system.