Intel® VTune™ Amplifier introduces the following basic categories of performance analysis:
Each category represents a branch in the performance analysis tree. You may choose to run any of the available analysis types either from the product graphical interface or using command line interface (amplxe-cl).
To choose and configure an analysis type from GUI:
Open the Analysis Type window using any of the following options:
Click the
New Analysis toolbar button.
Click the
Configure Project toolbar button/select the
Configure Project... option from the product menu and
click the
Analysis Type tab.
All analysis types in the VTune Amplifier are based on one of the following data collection types:
Hardware event-based sampling collection (driver-based and driverless mode), optionally extended with the stack collection
Each analysis type provides a set of performance metrics that helps you sort out the problems in your code and understand how to optimize it.
VTune Amplifier supports local and remote collection modes via GUI and command line. With VTune Amplifier XE, you can collect data on remote Linux* systems. With VTune Amplifier for Systems, you can collect performance data on remote Android* and Linux* platforms.
Algorithm Analysis
The Algorithm Analysis branch introduces analysis types targeted for software tuning. You run the analysis and use the collected data to understand the inefficiencies in your current algorithms, and improve application performance. Algorithm analysis includes the following analysis types:
Basic Hotspots: Performance analysis based on user-mode sampling and tracing collection. It focuses on a particular target, identifies functions that took the most CPU time to execute, restores the call tree for each function, and shows thread activity.
Advanced Hotspots: Event-based sampling analysis that monitors all the software executing on your system including the operating system modules. The collector interrupts the processor at the specified sampling interval and collects samples of instruction addresses.
Concurrency: Performance analysis based on user-mode sampling and tracing collection. It focuses on a particular target, identifies functions that took the most CPU time to execute, and shows how well your application is threaded for the existing number of logical CPU cores. In Intel System Studio, this analysis type does not support remote data collection on Android systems.
Locks and Waits: Performance analysis based on user-mode sampling and tracing collection that helps identify the synchronization objects that might cause ineffective CPU usage. In Intel System Studio, this analysis type does not support remote data collection on Android systems.
Compute-Intensive Application Analysis
The Compute-Intensive Application Analysis branch introduces analysis types based on applications that are compute-sensitive. They can be used as a starting point for overall application performance analysis before moving on to more targeted analysis types. Compute-intensive application analysis includes the following analysis types:
HPC Performance Characterization: Event-based sampling analysis that evaluates compute-sensitive or throughput applications for floating point operation and memory efficiency. It can be used as a starting point for understanding overall application performance.
Microarchitecture Analysis
The Microarchitecture Analysis branch introduces analysis types based on the event-based sampling data collection:
General Exploration: Event-based analysis that helps identify the most significant hardware issues affecting the performance of your application. Consider this analysis type as a starting point when you do hardware-level analysis.
Memory Access: Event-based analysis that measures a set of metrics to identify memory access related issues (for example, specific to NUMA architectures).
SGX Hotspots: Event-based analysis that helps identify performance-critical program units inside security enclaves on systems with Intel Software Guard Extensions (Intel SGX) feature enabled.
TSX Exploration: Event-based sampling analysis that is targeted for Intel processors supporting Intel Transactional Synchronization Extensions (Intel TSX). It helps analyze Intel TSX usage and causes of transactional aborts.
TSX Hotspots: Event-based sampling analysis that is targeted for Intel processors supporting Intel TSX. It helps analyze hotspots inside transactions.
Platform Analysis
The Platform Analysis branch introduces the analysis types monitoring CPU, GPU and power usage for your application/system:
CPU/GPU Concurrency: Event-based sampling analysis that enables you to explore code execution on the various CPU and GPU cores on your platform, correlate CPU and GPU activity and identify whether your application is GPU or CPU bound.
GPU Hotspots: Platform analysis targeted for applications using a Graphics Processing Unit (GPU) for rendering, video processing, and computations. If you ran the CPU/GPU Concurrency analysis and identified that your application is GPU-bound, use the GPU Hotspots analysis to go deeper and identify the most time-consuming GPU computing tasks and analyze performance per GPU hardware metrics.
System Overview: Driverless event-based sampling analysis that monitors general behavior of your target Linux* or Android* system and correlates power and performance metrics with the interrupt request (IRQ) handling. This analysis type is supported by the VTune Amplifier for Systems.
Disk Input and Output: Event-based platform-wide analysis that monitors utilization of the disk subsystem, CPU and processor buses.
Custom Analysis
All analysis types provided by the VTune Amplifier in the Analysis Type window are predefined by Intel architects and contain a default set of options. You may create custom analysis types based on the available collection types or based on the existing predefined analysis configurations.