Intel® VTune™ Profiler User Guide

User Guide

Contents

IPC

Metric Description

Instructions Retired per Cycle, or IPC shows average number of retired instructions per cycle. Modern superscalar processors issue up to four instructions per cycle, suggesting a theoretical best IPC of 4. 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 IPC down. A IPC of 1 is generally considered acceptable for HPC applications but different application domains will have very different expected values. Nonetheless, IPC is an excellent metric for judging an overall potential for application performance tuning.

Possible Issues

The IPC may be too low. 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 low IPC.

Product and Performance Information

1

Intel's compilers may or may not optimize to the same degree for non-Intel microprocessors for optimizations that are not unique to Intel microprocessors. These optimizations include SSE2, SSE3, and SSSE3 instruction sets and other optimizations. Intel does not guarantee the availability, functionality, or effectiveness of any optimization on microprocessors not manufactured by Intel. Microprocessor-dependent optimizations in this product are intended for use with Intel microprocessors. Certain optimizations not specific to Intel microarchitecture are reserved for Intel microprocessors. Please refer to the applicable product User and Reference Guides for more information regarding the specific instruction sets covered by this notice.

Notice revision #20110804