Thanks for replying Steve. I only used a single processor in both
simulations. What is shown is not the output from individual processors, but
that of the same processor at the end of every 100,000 instructions (see
sim_insts increment 100,000 each time)

On Mon, Jan 24, 2011 at 7:14 PM, Steve Reinhardt <[email protected]> wrote:

> With a multiprocessor, seemingly small changes in configuration can have a
> significant impact if it changes the order in which threads grab a lock, or
> something like that. So in particular, for the stats you have below, it
> seems likely that there's some serialized computation going on that happened
> on processor 3 in the first case and on processor 5 in the second case.
>
> Steve
>
> On Mon, Jan 24, 2011 at 1:30 PM, Stevenson Jian 
> <[email protected]>wrote:
>
>> Hi,
>> How does Timing CPU count number of instructions? If it stalls on a cache
>> miss, do the Nops count as instructions as well? The reason why I ask is
>> that by simply changing the size of the cache, the total number of
>> instructions when the benchmark completes varies by about 0.1 - 0.01%.
>>
>> Another anomaly that I am observing is that again, by simply changing the
>> size of the L2, the number of overall L2 accesses per let's say 100,000
>> instructions can vary by over 100%.
>>
>> The following are 2 runs that i did on m5 with the Freqmine benchmark. The
>> first simulation uses a 1Mb 4 way L2 with a latency of 6ns while the second
>> simulation uses a 2MB 8 way L2 with a latency of 4.5ns. The overall access
>> per 100,000 instructions are show.
>>
>> ---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
>> 1MB 4Way L2:
>> 2:
>> sim_insts                                   100200001
>>   # Number of instructions simulated
>> sim_ticks                                   196940000
>>   # Number of ticks simulated
>> system.l2.overall_accesses                       3231
>>   # number of overall (read+write) accesses
>> system.l2.overall_hits                           2515
>>   # number of overall hits
>>
>> 3:
>> sim_insts                                   100300001
>>   # Number of instructions simulated
>> sim_ticks                                   227453000
>>   # Number of ticks simulated
>> system.l2.overall_accesses                       4656
>>   # number of overall (read+write) accesses
>> system.l2.overall_hits                           3434
>>   # number of overall hits
>>
>> 4:
>> sim_insts                                   100400001
>>   # Number of instructions simulated
>> sim_ticks                                   154064000
>>   # Number of ticks simulated
>> system.l2.overall_accesses                       1078
>>   # number of overall (read+write) accesses
>> system.l2.overall_hits                            722
>>   # number of overall hits
>>
>> 5:
>> sim_insts                                   100500001
>>   # Number of instructions simulated
>> sim_ticks                                   155779000
>>   # Number of ticks simulated
>> system.l2.overall_accesses                       1575
>>   # number of overall (read+write) accesses
>> system.l2.overall_hits                           1154
>>   # number of overall hits
>>
>> ....
>>
>> 2MB 8Way L2:
>> 2:
>> sim_insts                                   100200001
>>   # Number of instructions simulated
>> sim_ticks                                   234810000
>>   # Number of ticks simulated
>> system.l2.overall_accesses                       2936
>>   # number of overall (read+write) accesses
>> system.l2.overall_hits                           1163
>>   # number of overall hits
>>
>> 3:
>> sim_insts                                   100300000
>>   # Number of instructions simulated
>> sim_ticks                                   174173000
>>   # Number of ticks simulated
>> system.l2.overall_accesses                       1496
>>   # number of overall (read+write) accesses
>> system.l2.overall_hits                            803
>>   # number of overall hits
>>
>> 4:
>> sim_insts                                   100400000
>>   # Number of instructions simulated
>> sim_ticks                                   190135000
>>   # Number of ticks simulated
>> system.l2.overall_accesses                       2290
>>   # number of overall (read+write) accesses
>> system.l2.overall_hits                           1672
>>   # number of overall hits
>>
>> 5:
>> sim_insts                                   100500000
>>   # Number of instructions simulated
>> sim_ticks                                   213086000
>>   # Number of ticks simulated
>> system.l2.overall_accesses                       4554
>>   # number of overall (read+write) accesses
>> system.l2.overall_hits                           3871
>>   # number of overall hits
>> .....
>>
>> ----------------------------------------------------------------------------
>>  Even if Nops are counted as instructions, I don't see how that would make
>> overall access/100,000 instructions vary by as much 200%. How does M5 count
>> the number of instructions?
>> Thanks,
>> Steve
>>
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>>
>
>
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