Intel 64 and IA-32 Architectures Software Developers Manual Volume 3B, System Programming Guide Part 2

Table Of Contents
18-58 Vol. 3
DEBUGGING AND PERFORMANCE MONITORING
This event counts reference clock cycles while the clock signal on the core is
running. The reference clock operates at a fixed frequency, irrespective of core
frequency changes due to performance state transitions. Processors may
implement this behavior differently. See Table A-6 and Table A-8 in Appendix A,
“Performance-Monitoring Events.
Last Level Cache References Event select 2EH, Umask 4FH
This event counts requests originating from the core that reference a cache line
in the last level cache. The event count may include speculation, but excludes
cache line fills due to a hardware-prefetch.
Because cache hierarchy, cache sizes and other implementation-specific charac-
teristics; value comparison to estimate performance differences is not recom-
mended.
Last Level Cache Misses Event select 2EH, Umask 41H
This event counts each cache miss condition for references to the last level cache.
The event count may include speculation, but excludes cache line fills due to
hardware-prefetch.
Because cache hierarchy, cache sizes and other implementation-specific charac-
teristics; value comparison to estimate performance differences is not recom-
mended.
Branch Instructions Retired — Event select C4H, Umask 00H
This event counts branch instructions at retirement. It counts the retirement of
the last micro-op of a branch instruction.
All Branch Mispredict Retired Event select C5H, Umask 00H
This event counts mispredicted branch instructions at retirement. It counts the
retirement of the last micro-op of a branch instruction in the architectural path of
execution and experienced misprediction in the branch prediction hardware.
Branch prediction hardware is implementation-specific across microarchitec-
tures; value comparison to estimate performance differences is not recom-
mended.
NOTE
Programming decisions or software precisians on functionality should
not be based on the event values or dependent on the existence of
performance monitoring events.
18.14 PERFORMANCE MONITORING (INTEL
®
CORE
SOLO
AND INTEL
®
CORE
DUO PROCESSORS)
In Intel Core Solo and Intel Core Duo processors, non-architectural performance
monitoring events are programmed using the same facilities (see Figure 18-13) used
for architectural performance events.