An efficient CPI stack counter architecture for superscalar processors

Cycles-Per-Instruction (CPI) stacks provide intuitive and insightful performance information to software developers. Performance bottlenecks are easily identified from CPI stacks, which hint towards software changes for improving performance. Computing CPI stacks on contemporary superscalar processors is non-trivial though because of various overlap effects. Prior work proposed a CPI counter architecture for computing CPI stacks on out-of-order processors. The accuracy of the obtained CPI stacks was evaluated previously, however, the hardware overhead analysis was not based on a detailed hardware implementation. In this paper, we implement the previously proposed CPI counter architecture in hardware and we find that the previous design can be further optimized. We propose a novel hardware- and power-efficient CPI counter architecture that reduces chip area by 44% and power consumption by 47% over the best possible prior design, while maintaining nearly the same level of performance and accuracy