Every CPU Cycle Counts
summary
A compact on‑chip trace encodes cycle‑accurate retirements as run‑length pairs and triplets using Elias gamma encoding and five count tokens called tokens A–E, plus an optional D/E mode that emits per‑cycle instruction counts for multi‑issue cores. A stall amortization option treats short stalls as retirements to cut trace volume, an example dropping from about 2.0 bits/instruction to 1.4 bits, while D/E reaches ~1.25 bits with full precision. This encoder plugs into a non‑intrusive SOC monitor and message fabric and feeds runtime anomaly and causality analytics.
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chapters (14)
- 0:00Intro
- 0:21Understanding Complex Systems
- 1:23CPU Stalling Behavior
- 2:03Retirement Delta Trace
- 3:50Variable Length Encoding
- 5:21CPU Core and Trace Encoder
- 6:31Number Tokens
- 7:31Example
- 9:05Stall amortization
- 11:02Multiissue CPU
- 12:18DNE Token
- 13:21Algorithm
- 15:24Trace System
- 19:01Summary
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