Intel Xeon E5-2600 Series - Section References; Per-Box Performance Monitoring Capabilities

Introduction
10 Reference Number: 327043-001
Events can be collected by reading a set of local counter registers. Each counter register is paired with
a dedicated control register used to specify what to count (i.e. through the event select/umask fields)
and how to count it. Some units provide the ability to specify additional information that can be used
to ‘filter’ the monitored events (e.g., C-box; see Section 2.3.3.3, “CBo Filter Register
(Cn_MSR_PMON_BOX_FILTER)”).
Uncore performance monitors represent a per-socket resource that is not meant to be affected by
context switches and thread migration performed by the OS, it is recommended that the monitoring
software agent establish a fixed affinity binding to prevent cross-talk of event counts from different
uncore PMU.
The programming interface of the counter registers and control registers fall into two address spaces:
• Accessed by MSR are PMON registers within the Cbo units, PCU, and U-Box, see Table 1-2.
• Access by PCI device configuration space are PMON registers within the HA, iMC, Intel® QPI,
R2PCIe and R3QPI units, see Table 1-3.
Irrespective of the address-space difference and with only minor exceptions, the bit-granular layout of
the control registers to program event code, unit mask, start/stop, and signal filtering via threshold/
edge detect are the same.
The general performance monitoring capabilities of each box are outlined in the following table.
1.3 Section References
The following sections provide a breakdown of the performance monitoring capabilities for each box.
• Section 2.1, “Uncore Per-Socket Performance Monitoring Control”
• Section 2.2, “UBox Performance Monitoring”
• Section 2.3, “Caching Agent (Cbo) Performance Monitoring”
• Section 2.6, “Power Control (PCU) Performance Monitoring”
• Section 2.4, “Home Agent (HA) Performance Monitoring”
• Section 2.5, “Memory Controller (iMC) Performance Monitoring”
• Section 2.7, “Intel® QPI Link Layer Performance Monitoring”
• Section 2.9, “R3QPI Performance Monitoring”
• Section 2.8, “R2PCIe Performance Monitoring”
• Section 2.10, “Packet Matching Reference”
Table 1-1. Per-Box Performance Monitoring Capabilities
Box # Boxes
# Counters/
Box
# Queue
Enabled
Bus
Lock?
Packet Match/
Mask Filters?
Bit Width
C-Box 8 4 1 N Y 44
HA 1 4 4 Y Y 48
iMC 1
(4 channels)
4 (+1)
(per channel)
4N N 48
PCU 1 4 (+2) 4 N N 48
QPI 1
(2 ports)
4
(per port)
4N Y? 48
R2PCIe 1 4 1 N N 44
R3QPI 1
(2 links)
31N N44
U-Box 1 2 (+1) 0 N/A N 44