Introducing the Intel® VTune™ Amplifier

Intel VTune Amplifier is a performance analysis tool for users developing serial and multithreaded applications. VTune Amplifier helps you analyze the algorithm choices and identify where and how your application can benefit from available hardware resources.

Use the VTune Amplifier to locate or determine the following:

The most time-consuming (hot) functions in your application and/or on the whole system
Sections of code that do not effectively utilize available processor time
The best sections of code to optimize for sequential performance and for threaded performance
Synchronization objects that affect the application performance
Whether, where, and why your application spends time on input/output operations
The performance impact of different synchronization methods, different numbers of threads, or different algorithms
Thread activity and transitions
Hardware-related issues in your code such as data sharing, cache misses, branch misprediction, and others

VTune Amplifier can be installed on Windows*, macOS*, and Linux* platforms and used for analysis of local and remote target systems.

On Windows systems, VTune Amplifier integrates into Microsoft Visual Studio* software and is also available as a standalone GUI client. On Linux and macOS systems, VTune Amplifier works exclusively as a standalone GUI client. On macOS, you can set up your project, run remote analysis, and view the data collection result on the host. Local macOS analysis is not supported. On all supported systems, you can use the command line interface (amplxe-cl) for collecting data and performing regression testing.

VTune Amplifier is delivered as one of the following product versions:

Intel® VTune™ Amplifier XE
Intel® VTune™ Amplifier for Systems

Both versions of VTune Amplifier include Intel® Performance Snapshot (preview), a basic tool that provides a simple view into storage, application, and MPI application performance improvement opportunities.

Intel VTune Amplifier XE

Intel VTune Amplifier Performance Profiler is available as part of the Intel Parallel Studio XE and as a standalone product. It is targeted for performance analysis of Windows and Linux applications, including OpenMP*, MPI applications, native and offload applications running on Intel Xeon Phi™ coprocessor.

The default installation path for the VTune Amplifier XE is /opt/intel/vtune_amplifier_xe_version.

On macOS* systems, the default <install_dir> is /Applications/Intel VTune Amplifier XE <version>.app.

Intel VTune Amplifier for Systems

Intel VTune Amplifier for Systems is available as part of the Intel System Studio and targeted for performance and power analysis on Android, Wind River* Linux, Yocto* Linux, Tizen* platforms, or a customized Linux OS for embedded IoT or mobile devices.

VTune Amplifier for Systems introduces the following types of analysis:

Performance analysis: Find serial and parallel code bottlenecks, analyze algorithm choices, GPU engines usage, and understand where and how your application can benefit from available hardware resources. This type of analysis is supported for Android*, Windows (local only), and Linux targets.
Energy analysis: Analyze power consumption and identify the cause of the wake-ups that waste energy. This type of analysis is supported for Android, Windows, and Linux targets.

VTune Amplifier for Systems can be also accessed from the Eclipse* development environment on Linux and Windows systems.

The default installation path for the VTune Amplifier for Systems is:

For super-users: /opt/intel/system_studio_version/vtune_amplifier_for_systems
For ordinary users: $HOME/intel/system_studio_version/vtune_amplifier_for_systems

On macOS* systems, the default <install_dir> is /Applications/Intel VTune Amplifier <version> for Systems.app.

Key Features

This table summarizes availability of the key VTune Amplifier XE and VTune Amplifier for Systems types of analysis per host and remote target platform:

Analysis	VTune Amplifier XE				VTune Amplifier for Systems
	Windows	Linux		macOS	Windows	Linux		Android	macOS	FreeBSD*
	Host	Host	Target	Host	Host	Host	Target	Target	Host	Target
Energy analysis					+	+	+	+
Remote analysis	+	+	+	+	+	+	+	+	+	+
IDE (Eclipse/Visual Studio)	+				+	+	+
Algorithm analysis	+	+	+		+	+	+	+¹
HPC Performance Characterization analysis	+	+	+		+	+	+
Microarchitecture analysis	+	+	+		+	+	+	+		+
Memory Access analysis	+	+	+		+	+	+
Disk I/O analysis	+	+	+		+	+	+
System Overview analysis					+	+	+	+
Custom analysis	+	+	+		+	+	+	+		+
GPU analysis	+	+²	+²		+	+²	+²	+
OpenCL™ kernel analysis	+	+²	+²		+²	+²	+²
Intel Media SDK program analysis		+²	+²			+²	+²
Java* code analysis	+	+	+		+	+	+	+
.NET* code Analysis	+				+
Python* code analysis	+	+	+		+	+	+
Go* application analysis	+³	+³	+³		+³	+³	+³
OpenMP* analysis	+	+	+		+	+	+
MPI analysis	+	+	+		+	+	+
Intel Xeon Phi™ Coprocessor analysis	+	+	+
KVM Guest OS analysis		+				+
Ftrace* events analysis						+	+	+
Atrace* events analysis								+

¹Basic Hotspots only; ²Intel HD Graphics and Intel Iris™ Graphics only; ³EBS analysis only

VTune Amplifier provides features that facilitate the analysis and interpretation of the results:

Top-down tree analysis: Use to understand which execution flow in your application is more performance-critical.
Timeline analysis: Analyze thread activity and the transitions between threads.
ITT API analysis: Use the ITT API to mark significant transition points in your code and analyze performance per frame, task, and so on.
Architecture diagram: Analyze GPU OpenCL™ applications by exploring the GPU hardware metrics per GPU architecture blocks.
Source analysis: View source with performance data attributed per source line to explore possible causes of an issue.
Comparison analysis: Compare performance analysis results for several application runs to localize the performance changes you got after optimization.
Start data collection paused: Click the Start Paused button on the command bar to start the application without collecting performance data and click the Resume button to enable the collection at the right moment.
Grouping: Group your data by different granularity in the grid view to analyze the problem from different angles.
Viewpoints: Choose among preset configurations of windows and panes available for the analysis result. This helps focus on particular performance problems.
Hot keys to start and stop the analysis: Use a batch file to create hot keys to start and stop a particular analysis.

CAUTION

Because the VTune Amplifier requires specific knowledge of assembly-level instructions, its analysis may not operate correctly if a program (target) is compiled to generate non-Intel architecture instructions. In this case, run the analysis with a target executable compiled to generate only Intel instructions. After you finish using the VTune Amplifier, you can use optimizing compiler options that generate non-Intel architecture instructions.

Intel Performance Snapshot (Preview)

Intel Performance Snapshot provides three quick ways to view performance optimization opportunities.

Application Performance Snapshot gives a first look at areas to improve your application's performance with the available hardware, including CPU and FPU usage and memory stalls.
Storage Performance Snapshot analyzes system storage, CPU, memory, and network usage and is particularly useful for analyzing workload optimization in a data center.
MPI Performance Snapshot explores MPI imbalance, CPI rate and memory usage, and MPI vs computation time to improve cluster performance.

Note

This is a PREVIEW FEATURE. A preview feature may or may not appear in a future production release. It is available for your use in the hopes that you will provide feedback on its usefulness and help determine its future. Data collected with a preview feature is not guaranteed to be backward compatible with future releases. Please send your feedback to parallel.studio.support@intel.com for VTune Amplifier XE andto intelsystemstudio@intel.com for VTune Amplifier for Systems.