What is Top-down analysis?
A method using performance counters to divide CPU issue slots into frontend bound, backend bound, bad speculation and retiring, narrowing down bottlenecks.
Field: Performance Analysis
Top-down analysis in the explanations
Top-down analysis classifies each cycle's issue slots by whether they went empty because the front end (fetch and decode) could not keep up, stalled in the back end (waiting on execution units or memory), were spent on instructions discarded after misprediction, or were used by instructions that completed (retired).
In top-down microarchitecture analysis using performance co…
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Related terms
Benchmark CPU time Cycles per instruction (CPI) Flame graph Geometric mean Gustafson's law Harmonic mean Little's law Microbenchmark Parallel efficiency