Optimizing an application’s performance for the underlying machine is a difficult task. Increasing hardware complexity, workload diversity, and the unmanageable volume of data produced by performance tools increase the optimization challenges. At the same time resource and time constraints get tougher with recently emerged segments.

This session overviews the Top-down Microarchitecture Analysis (TMA) method and its handling of cycle accounting in modern out-of-order cores. It illustrates some performance problems that call for truly top-down-oriented metrics, presents recent challenges of modern data centers, and performance monitoring unit (PMU) enhancements to address them