How can i access the Intel CPU Counter

Question

Is there any small tool that gives me access to the data gathered by the Intel CPU Counters (like L1/L2 cache misses, branch prediction failures ... you know there are hunderts of them on modern Core2 CPU's).

It must work on Windows (while being able to use it with Solaris, FreeBSD, Linux, MacOSX would of course be nice).

Answer 1

Check out the Intel PCM (Performance Counter Monitor) tool which does exactly what you want to do.

Link: https://software.intel.com/en-us/articles/intel-performance-counter-monitor-a-better-way-to-measure-cpu-utilization

Intel PCM provides a rich API that allows you to instrument your code. Furthermore, to date, PCM is the only tool to read uncore events too.

Answer 2

This thread seems a little old but if you're still interested, I wrote a howto recently on this topic using nothing more than rdmsr and wrmsr in Linux. It only deals with the performance counters on an Intel uncore for Westmere, but the process I described might help you figure out what you need if you haven't already. I'm sure Windows has some equivalent program or function call to RDMSR and WRMSR. The problem is you need to be ring 0 (kernel mode) to read MSRs. I have no idea how to do that in Windows. I won't be able to help with any Windows questions but may be able to answer some MSR-related questions if you have any. I'm by no means an expert though.