Intel Corporation

Laura A Knauth

Konrad K Lai

Ravi Rajwar

Peggy J Irelan

Matthew C Merten

Peter Lachner

Martin Guy Dixon

Michael W Chynoweth

Stanislav Viktorovich Bratanov

Seung-Woo Kim

Avinash Sodani

Robert S Chappell

Ronak Singhal

Vijaykumar Balaram Kadgi

James Hadley

Morris Marden

Joseph A McMahon

Hugh M Caffey

Grace C Lee

Fariborz Tabesh

In one embodiment, a processor includes a performance monitor including a last branch record (LBR) stack to store a call stack to an event of interest, where the call stack is collected responsive to a trigger for the event. The processor further includes logic to control the LBR stack to operate in a call stack mode such that an entry to a call instruction for a leaf function is cleared on return from the leaf function. Other embodiments are described and claimed.

Method and apparatus for obtaining a call stack to an event of interest and analyzing the same

In one embodiment, a processor includes an execution unit and at least one last branch record (LBR) register to store address information of a branch taken during program execution. This register may further store a transaction indicator to indicate whether the branch was taken during a transactional memory (TM) transaction. This register may further store an abort indicator to indicate whether the branch was caused by a transaction abort. Other embodiments are described and claimed.

Last branch record indicators for transactional memory

A processor includes a processing unit including a storage module having stored thereon a physical reference list for storing identifications of physical registers that have been referenced by multiple logical registers, and a reclamation module for reclaiming physical registers to a free list based on a count of each of the physical registers on the physical reference list.

Physical reference list for tracking physical register sharing

A system and method for a performance monitoring hardware unit that may include logic to poll one or more performance monitoring shared resources and determine a status of each performance monitoring shared resource. The performance monitoring hardware unit may also include an interface to provide the status to allow programming of the one or more performance monitoring shared resource. The status may correspond to a usage and/or an errata condition. Thus, the performance monitoring hardware unit may prevent programming conflicts of the one or more performance monitoring shared resources.

Performance monitoring of shared processing resources

Event counter checkpointing and restoring is disclosed. In one implementation, a processor includes a first event counter to count events that occur during execution within the processor, event counter checkpoint logic, communicably coupled with the first event counter, to store, prior to a transactional execution of the processor, a value of the first event counter, a second event counter to count events prior to and during the transactional execution, wherein the second event counter is to increment without resetting after the transactional execution is aborted, event count restore logic to restore the first event counter to the stored value after the transactional execution is aborted, and tuning logic to determine, in response to aborting of the transactional execution, a number of the events that occurred during the transactional execution based on the stored value of the first event counter and a value of the second event counter.

Event counter checkpointing and restoring

Last branch record register for storing taken branch information and transactional memory transaction indicator to be used in transaction execution analysis

A processor includes an execution unit to execute instructions, where each operand of each executed instruction has one or more elements of an element size and at least one operand of the instruction corresponds to a register of a register size. The processor further includes a counter configured to count a number of instructions that have been executed by the execution unit associated with a particular combination of register size and element size.

SIMD processor with programmable counters externally configured to count executed instructions having operands of particular register size and element size combination

A method of one aspect may include storing an event count of an event counter that counts events that occur during execution within a logic device. The method may further include restoring the event counter to the stored event count after the event counter has counted additional events. Other methods are also disclosed. Apparatus, systems, and machine-readable medium having software are also disclosed.

Processor with last branch record register storing transaction indicator

Growing community of inventors

Portland, OR, United States of America

Laura A Knauth