What's new? - Intel® VTune™ Amplifier XE 2015 Update 2

By MrAnderson (Intel), Updated

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Intel® VTune™ Amplifier XE 2015

A performance profiler for serial and parallel performance analysis. Overview, training, support.

New for the Update 2 release! (Optional update unless you need…)

As compared to 2015 Update 1 release

All Operating Systems

Note: We are now labeling analysis tool updates as "Recommended for all users" or "Optional update unless you need…".  Recommended updates will be available about once a quarter for users who do not want to update frequently.  Optional updates may be released more frequently, providing access to new processor support, new features, and critical fixes.

Resources

Contents

 

File: vtune_amplifier_xe_2015_update2.tar.gz

Installer for Intel® VTune™ Amplifier XE 2015 Update 2 for Linux*

File: VTune_Amplifier_XE_2015_update2_setup.exe

Installer for Intel® VTune™ Amplifier XE 2015 Update 2 for Windows*

File: vtune_amplifier_xe_2015_update2.dmg

Installer for Intel® VTune™ Amplifier XE 2015 Update 2 - OS X* host only

* Other names and brands may be claimed as the property of others.

Microsoft, Windows, Visual Studio, Visual C++, and the Windows logo are trademarks, or registered trademarks of Microsoft Corporation in the United States and/or other countries.

Intel® Transactional Synchronization Extensions (Intel® TSX) TSX Hotspots analysis providing precise clockticks data for the Intel microarchitecture code name Haswell

TSX Hotspots analysis type uses event-based sampling collection and is targeted for the Intel® microarchitecture code name Haswell with Intel® Transactional Synchronization Extensions (Intel® TSX). 

Due to PMU limitations, Advanced Hotspots cannot be collected inside an Intel® TSX transaction.  Thus, the new “TSX Hotspots” analysis type has been added to help identify performance-critical program units inside transactions.

To launch the analysis, select Microarchitecture Analysis > CPU Specific Analysis > Haswell Analysis > TSX Hotspots in the analysis tree, or select the Collect precise clockticks option for the custom event-based sampling configuration. The collected result opens in the default TSX Exploration viewpoint.

For more details please refer to the “TSX Hotspots Analysis” topic in the product help.

Bandwidth analysis improvements

  • Regular DDR memory bandwidth analysis for the 5th Generation Intel® Core™ processors (code name: Broadwell) and Intel microarchitecture code name Silvermont
  • Intel® QuickPath Interconnect (Intel® QPI) “QPI Bandwidth” data analysis with grouping by package/Intel® QPI link for server platforms (codenamed Ivy Town & Haswell-EP)
  • Total, Read and WriteBandwidth timeline areas merged into single area making it easier to see all bandwidth activity
  • Grouping by package for the CPU Time timeline area

GPU Architecture Diagram 

On Windows* systems with Intel HD Graphics you may find it easier to analyze your OpenCL application by exploring the GPU hardware metrics per GPU architecture blocks.

To do this, choose the Computing Task grouping level in the Graphics window, select an OpenCL kernel of interest and click the Architecture Diagram tab in the Timeline pane. VTune Amplifier updates the architecture diagram for your platform with performance data per GPU hardware metrics for the time range the selected kernel was executed.

GPU analysis on Linux

GPU analysis on Linux* targets is now available in VTune Amplifier XE, including:

  • Support for the OpenCL application analysis (for Intel HD Graphics) and GPU usage analysis (except for the GPU hardware metrics)
    Refer to the “GPU Analysis”, “GPU Usage” and “Interpreting GPU OpenCL™ Application Analysis Data” help topics for details on analysis configuration and results interpretation.

  • Intel® Media SDK program analysis for Linux systems with Intel HD Graphics.

    To perform analysis of Intel® Media SDK tasks execution over time, make sure to configure your Linux kernel according to the “Intel® Media SDK Program Analysis Configuration” topic in the VTune Amplifier help.

    Select the Trace OpenCL and Intel Media SDK programs (Intel HD Graphics only) option in one of Algorithm or Custom analysis types. 
    To analyze Intel Media SDK tasks, focus on Timeline pane. 

    If you also enable the Analyze GPU usage option for the collection, use the Graphics window to correlate data for the Intel Media SDK tasks execution with the GPU software queue data. 

  • Compute extended counter set support added for GPU hardware metrics analysis on the 5th Generation Intel® Core™ processors (code name: Broadwell).

  • The Global/local accesses hardware event set for GPU analysis has been renamed Compute basic (with global/local memory accesses) to better represent the collected data. See the description in the "GPU Metrics” topic of the product help for detailed metrics.

For more complete information about compiler optimizations, see our Optimization Notice.