Sandy Bridge

Architecture specific notes for Intel® SandyBridge

Performance groups

Intel® SandyBridge Performance groups

Events

The input file for the events on Intel® SandyBridge can be found here.

Counters

• Fixed-purpose counters
• General-purpose counters
• Thermal counter
• Power counters

Fixed-purpose counters

Since the Core2 microarchitecture, Intel® provides a set of fixed-purpose counters. Each can measure only one specific event. They are core-local, hence each hardware thread has its own set of fixed counters.

Counters

Counter name	Event name
FIXC0	INSTR_RETIRED_ANY
FIXC1	CPU_CLK_UNHALTED_CORE
FIXC2	CPU_CLK_UNHALTED_REF

#### Available Options

Option	Argument	Description	Comment
anythread	N	Set bit 2+(index*4) in config register
kernel	N	Set bit (index*4) in config register

### General-purpose counters The Intel® SandyBridge microarchitecture provides 4 general-purpose counters consisting of a config and a counter register. They are core-local, hence each hardware thread has its own set of general-purpose counters. #### Counters

Counter name	Event name
PMC0	*
PMC1	*
PMC2	*
PMC3	*

#### Available Options

Option	Argument	Description	Comment
edgedetect	N	Set bit 18 in config register
kernel	N	Set bit 17 in config register
anythread	N	Set bit 21 in config register
threshold	8 bit hex value	Set bits 24-31 in config register
invert	N	Set bit 23 in config register

#### Special handling for events The Intel® SandyBridge microarchitecture provides measureing of offcore events in PMC counters. Therefore the stream of offcore events must be filtered using the OFFCORE_RESPONSE registers. The Intel® SandyBridge microarchitecture has two of those registers. LIKWID defines some events that perform the filtering according to the event name. Although there are many bitmasks possible, LIKWID natively provides only the ones with response type ANY. Own filtering can be applied with the OFFCORE_RESPONSE_0_OPTIONS and OFFCORE_RESPONSE_1_OPTIONS events. Only for those events two more counter options are available:

Option	Argument	Description	Comment
match0	16 bit hex value	Input value masked with 0x8FFF and written to bits 0-15 in the OFFCORE_RESPONSE register	Check the Intel®®® Software Developer System Programming Manual, Vol. 3, Chapter Performance Monitoring and the event files at https://download.01.org/perfmon/SNB.
match1	22 bit hex value	Input value is written to bits 16-37 in the OFFCORE_RESPONSE register	Check the Intel®®® Software Developer System Programming Manual, Vol. 3, Chapter Performance Monitoring and the event files at https://download.01.org/perfmon/SNB.

Thermal counters

The Intel® SandyBridge microarchitecture provides one register for the current core temperature.

Counters

Counter name	Event name
TMP0	TEMP_CORE

Power counters

The Intel® SandyBridge microarchitecture provides measurements of the current power consumption through the RAPL interface.

Counters

Counter name	Event name
PWR0	PWR_PKG_ENERGY
PWR1	PWR_PP0_ENERGY
PWR2*	PWR_PP1_ENERGY
PWR3	PWR_DRAM_ENERGY

*) The PWR2 counter is often not implemented by Intel® SandyBridge systems