CodeAnalyst

CodeAnalyst

Developer(s)	AMD
Operating system	Linux, Windows
Type	Profiler
Website	developer.amd.com/CPU/CODEANALYST/

AMD CodeAnalyst is a GUI-based code profiler for x86-based machines. CodeAnalyst has similar look and feel on both Linux and Microsoft Windows platforms. CodeAnalyst uses specific hardware and event profiling techniques which are designed to work with AMD processors, as well as a timer-based profiling technique which does not require a specific processor; this allows a subset of profiling features to work on non-AMD processors, such as Intel processors.^[1]

Code optimization

CodeAnalyst is built on OProfile for the Linux platform and is available as a free download. The GUI assists in various kinds of code profiling including time based profile, event based profile and others. This produces statistics about details such as time spent in each subroutine which can be drilled down to the instruction level. The time taken by the instructions are indicative of stalls in the pipeline during instruction execution. Better code optimization can be accomplished with the understanding of pipeline stages in x86 and the graphical representation of pipeline simulation provided by CodeAnalyst. The optimization could be as simple as reordering the instructions or altering/removing the branches and loops so that the maximum number of execution units(Load/Store units, ALU, FP execution unit...) are utilized in parallel.

See also

• Intel VTune

References

1. ^ "How I ran AMD CodeAnalyst on an Intel CPU". Nov 04, 2009. http://www.virtualdub.org/blog/pivot/entry.php?id=288. Retrieved 2010-02-23. 

External links

• http://developer.amd.com/CPU/CODEANALYST/