hardware performance counters

Is there a tool on mac os for monitoring hardware performance counters?

Posted on Aug 14, 2019 3:36 PM

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3 replies

Aug 14, 2019 5:45 PM in response to BobTheFisherman

Hardware performance counters are registers on every modern CPU that count interesting events like L1, l2 and L3 cache misses, retired instructions, branch miss-predictions and literally hundreds of other things. A good paper to read to get a feeling for the value of such counters is

https://oaklandsok.github.io/papers/das2019.pdf

By the way, the last 2 columns of the top command with the following flags provide the values of two of the most important counters -- retired instructions and cpu cycles

top -d -i 5 -n 25 -s 5 -u -stats pid,command,cpu,time,csw,threads,mem,pstate,instrs,cycles -e

But there is so much more that would be nice to get. Linux, Solaris AIX, among others all have tools to access performance counters. So my question is: does Apple, or some third party have such a tool for Mac machines?

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hardware performance counters

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