Performance Monitoring

The Pentium® was the first IA32 processor to implement logic to log performance measurement information. All subsequent IA32 processors implement Performance Monitoring logic (but the Pentium®, P6 and Pentium® 4 implementations are not compatible with each other).

The Pentium®'s Performance Monitoring logic consisted of the following (see Figure 21-12 on page 506):

  • Two 40-bit performance counters implemented as MSRs (PerfCtr0 and PerfCtr1).

  • The 32-bit CESR (Counter Event Select Register) implemented as an MSR. This register was divided into two sets of bit fields (one set for each of the two counters):

    - The 6-bit CESR[ES] (Event Select) field selected the event type to be measured. The event types are defined in Appendix ...

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