Developer’s Manual
January, 2004
113
Intel XScale® Core
Developer’s Manual
Performance Monitoring
8.4
Performance Monitoring Events
Table 8-12
lists events that may be monitored. Each of the Performance Monitor Count Registers
can count any listed event. Software selects which event is counted by each PMNx register by
programming the evtCountx fields.
Table 8-12.
Performance Monitoring Events
Event Number
(evtCountx)
Event Definition
0x0
Instruction cache miss requires fetch from external memory.
0x1
Instruction cache cannot deliver an instruction. This could indicate an ICache miss or an
ITLB miss. This event will occur every cycle in which the condition is present.
0x2
Stall due to a data dependency. This event will occur every cycle in which the condition is
present.
0x3
Instruction TLB miss.
0x4
Data TLB miss.
0x5
Branch instruction executed, branch may or may not have changed program flow. (Counts
only B and BL instructions, in both ARM and Thumb mode.)
0x6
Branch mispredicted. (Counts only B and BL instructions, in both ARM and Thumb mode.)
0x7
Instruction executed.
0x8
Stall because the data cache buffers are full. This event will occur every cycle in which the
condition is present.
0x9
Stall because the data cache buffers are full. This event will occur once for each contiguous
sequence of this type of stall.
0xA
Data cache access, not including Cache Operations (defined in
Section 7.2.8
)
0xB
Data cache miss, not including Cache Operations (defined in
Section 7.2.8
)
0xC
Data cache write-back. This event occurs once for each 1/2 line (four words) that are
written back from the cache.
0xD
Software changed the PC. All ‘b’, ‘bl’, ‘blx’, ‘mov[s] pc, Rm’, ‘ldm Rn, {Rx, pc}’, ‘ldr pc, [Rm]’,
pop {pc} will be counted. An ‘mcr p<cp>, 0,pc, ...’, will not. The count also does not
increment when an event occurs and the PC changes to the event address, e.g., IRQ, FIQ,
SWI, etc.
0x10 through
0x17
Defined by ASSP. See the Intel XScale
®
core implementation option section of the ASSP
architecture specification for more details.
0xFF
Power saving event. This event deactivates the corresponding PMU event counter
all others
Reserved, unpredictable results