Intel® VTune™ Amplifier XE and Intel® VTune™ Amplifier for Systems Help
Cycles per Instructions Retired is a fundamental performance metric indicating an average amount of time each instruction took to execute, in units of cycles. For Intel Atom processors, the theoretical best CPI per thread is 0.50, but CPI's over 2.0 warrant investigation. High CPI values may indicate latency in the system that could be reduced such as long-latency memory, floating-point operations, non-retired instructions due to branch mispredictions, or instruction starvation in the front-end. Beware that some optimizations such as SIMD will use less instructions per cycle (increasing CPI), and debug code can use redundant instructions creating more instructions per cycle (decreasing CPI).
The CPI may be too high. This could be caused by issues such as memory stalls, instruction starvation, branch misprediction or long latency instructions. Explore the other hardware-related metrics to identify what is causing high CPI.