CPU Microarchitecture Profiling With Ampere PMU Profiler

▤ Summary

Ampere PMU Profiler is a Python-based tool that uses Linux perf and validated PMU metrics to analyze CPU microarchitectural behavior on Ampere processors. It helps engineers find the root causes of slowdowns such as cache misses, instruction fetch inefficiency, and pipeline stalls. The article places the tool within Ampere's APEX performance tuning workflow, where teams move from platform checks and system profiling to deeper hardware-level analysis. It also shows how the profiler complements system-level tools by explaining why a hot code path is slow rather than only where time is spent.

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