Cycles per Instruction Retired, or CPI, is a fundamental performance metric indicating approximately how much time each executed instruction took, in units of cycles. Modern superscalar processors issue up to four instructions per cycle, suggesting a theoretical best CPI of 0.25. But various effects (long-latency memory, floating-point, or SIMD operations; non-retired instructions due to branch mispredictions; instruction starvation in the front-end) tend to pull the observed CPI up. A CPI of 1 is generally considered acceptable for HPC applications but different application domains will have very different expected values. Nonetheless, CPI is an excellent metric for judging an overall potential for application performance tuning.

The CPI may be too high. This could be caused by issues such as memory stalls, instruction starvation, branch misprediction or long latency instructions. Explore the other hardware-related metrics to identify what is causing high CPI.