| March 18, 2011 12:00 AM PDT | |
Introduction :
The Intel® Performance Bottleneck Analyzer (Intel® PBA) framework seeks to relate knowledge of static assembly and latest performance monitoring techniques to automatically find and prioritize architectural bottlenecks for the Intel® Core™ Processor Family and the Intel® Atom™ processor. The bottlenecks which cannot be explained are prioritized and tagged for further analysis. To accomplish this goal, the tool utilizes performance monitoring data to recreate the hottest paths of instruction execution through a binary. The recreated paths of execution are then passed through an analysis which combines searches for well known code generation issues with knowledge of hundreds of the performance monitoring events. The toolset is designed, written, and maintained by performance engineers who work in the field to resolve performance bottlenecks every day. All features enabled in the toolset have already been used to study and identify performance opportunities on software.
New in Version 4.0.1:
More detailed information on installation, setup, and running of the Intel® PBA framework and its capabilities can be found in the user manual. Get the user manual here: Intel® Performance Bottleneck Analyzer User Manual
Known Issues or Limitations :
Please refer to the user manual for all current issues and limitations.
* - Other names and brands may be claimed as the property of others.
The Intel® Performance Bottleneck Analyzer (Intel® PBA) framework seeks to relate knowledge of static assembly and latest performance monitoring techniques to automatically find and prioritize architectural bottlenecks for the Intel® Core™ Processor Family and the Intel® Atom™ processor. The bottlenecks which cannot be explained are prioritized and tagged for further analysis. To accomplish this goal, the tool utilizes performance monitoring data to recreate the hottest paths of instruction execution through a binary. The recreated paths of execution are then passed through an analysis which combines searches for well known code generation issues with knowledge of hundreds of the performance monitoring events. The toolset is designed, written, and maintained by performance engineers who work in the field to resolve performance bottlenecks every day. All features enabled in the toolset have already been used to study and identify performance opportunities on software.
New in Version 4.0.1:
- XED disassembler bug fix.
- Precise instruction distribution bug fix.
- Last branch record bug on Atom is fixed.
- Two bug fixes in instruction look-up.
- Java* runtime (JRE) version 6 Update 10 or greater
- Intel® VTune™ Amplifier XE – needed for parsing sampling collector data. Get it here: Intel® VTune™ Amplifier XE
- SEP – for data collection. This is packaged with Intel® Performance Tuning Utility (Intel® PTU) software. You must download Intel PTU 4.0 Update 5 to use all the latest analysis capabilities of PBA. Get Intel PTU here: Intel® Performance Tuning Utility
More detailed information on installation, setup, and running of the Intel® PBA framework and its capabilities can be found in the user manual. Get the user manual here: Intel® Performance Bottleneck Analyzer User Manual
Known Issues or Limitations :
Please refer to the user manual for all current issues and limitations.
* - Other names and brands may be claimed as the property of others.
For more complete information about compiler optimizations, see our Optimization Notice.
Comments (6) 
| April 27, 2011 7:08 AM PDT
Michael Chynoweth (Intel)
|
We have logged Jeff's bug (1st comment) and will put out a fix in our patch due out in a month. In the meantime the procedure Jeff has provided is a good workaround for 32-bit WinXP users who run into the XED issue. Jeff: Thanks for the bug and the workaround! Thanks, Mike |
| May 19, 2011 11:28 PM PDT
Rajshree Chabukswar (Intel)
|
We have noticed on several customer systems that the tool may fail to load the sampling data. If this issue is seen, please make sure that the only license file you have in path is for VTune Amplifier XE mentioned in the prerequisites above. Having older versions of VTune licenses in path may cause failure to run analysis. Thanks, -rajshree |
July 8, 2011 2:56 AM PDT
 Peter Larson | This tool has been immensefully helpful for my new Atom, which suffers heavily under Win7. Thanks! |
| July 24, 2011 7:29 AM PDT
asetadam | whatif member |
| August 2, 2011 6:32 PM PDT
Osvaldo Galicia Gasperin
|
I is a good tool it is very helpful on low-end systems as in Servers , but its dependency of the Intel® VTune™ Amplifier XE it makes difficult their use. Maybe if the next release it is and independent application i could be a hit. Thank you for let me participate |
Trackbacks (2)
- Top Down Methodology for Software Performance Analysis – Intel Software Network Blogs - Intel® Software Network
May 4, 2011 3:33 PM PDT - Top Down Methodology for Software Performance Analysis | ServerGround.net
May 4, 2011 4:03 PM PDT
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Author
Jeff Wannamaker
Running XED for disassembly on raw text section
ERROR: Dump file generated for Receiver is invalid.
This turned out to be due to the version of xed.exe not being compatible with 32 bit XP. Running xed.exe directly caused a Windows error message to appear that said: "The procedure entry point Wow64DisableWow64FsRedirection could not be located in the dynamic link library KERNEL32.dll".
I did a google for "XED dissasembler" and found http://software.intel.com/en-us/articles/intel-software-development-emulator/. I downloaded this using the "DOWNLOAD WINDOWS IA-32 and Intel64" link and a got file called sde-ivb-external-3.88-2010-12-21-win-intel64-and-ia32.tar.bz2 file. I extracted this and in it was a xed.exe. I used this to replace the version in the Performance Bottleneck Analyzer and after this everything worked fine.