Intel® VTune™ Amplifier
Intel® VTune™ Amplifier provides information on code performance for users developing serial and multithreaded applications. VTune Amplifier helps you analyze the algorithm choices and identify where and how your application can benefit from available hardware resources. Use the VTune Amplifier to locate or determine the following:
The most time-consuming (hot) functions in your application and/or on the whole system
Sections of code that do not effectively utilize available processor time
The best sections of code to optimize for sequential performance and for threaded performance
Synchronization objects that affect the application performance
Whether, where, and why your application spends time on input/output operations
The performance impact of different synchronization methods, different numbers of threads, or different algorithms
Thread activity and transitions
Hardware-related bottlenecks in your code
VTune Amplifier can be installed on Windows*, OS X*, and Linux* platforms and used for analysis of local and remote target systems. On Windows systems, VTune Amplifier integrates into Microsoft Visual Studio* software and is also available as a standalone GUI client. On Linux and OS X systems, VTune Amplifier works exclusively as a standalone GUI client. On OS X, you can set up your project, run remote analysis, and view the data collection result on the host. Local OS X analysis is not supported. On all supported systems, you can use the command line interface (amplxe-cl) for collecting data and performing regression testing.
VTune Amplifier is delivered as one of the following product versions:
Intel VTune Amplifier Performance Profiler is available as part of the Intel Parallel Studio XE and as a standalone product. It is targeted for performance analysis of Windows and Linux applications, including OpenMP*, MPI applications, native and offload applications running on Intel Xeon Phi™ coprocessor.
The default installation path for the VTune Amplifier XE is /opt/intel/vtune_amplifier_xe_version.
On OS X* systems, the default <install_dir> is /Applications/Intel VTune Amplifier XE <version>.app.
Intel VTune Amplifier for Systems is available as part of the Intel System Studio and targeted for profiling embedded platforms. VTune Amplifier for Systems introduces the following types of analysis:
Performance analysis: Find serial and parallel code bottlenecks, analyze algorithm choices, GPU engines usage, and understand where and how your application can benefit from available hardware resources. This type of analysis is supported for Android*, Windows (local only), and Linux targets.
Intel Energy Profiler analysis: Analyze power consumption and identify the cause of the wake-ups that waste energy. This type of analysis is supported for Android, Windows, and Linux targets.
VTune Amplifier for Systems can be also accessed from the Eclipse* development environment on Linux and Windows systems.
The default installation path for the VTune Amplifier for Systems is:
On OS X* systems, the default <install_dir> is /Applications/Intel VTune Amplifier <version> for Systems.app.
VTune Amplifier provides features that facilitate the analysis and interpretation of the results:
Top-down tree analysis: Use to understand which execution flow in your application is more performance-critical.
Timeline analysis: Analyze thread activity and the transitions between threads.
Frame analysis: Use the Frame API to mark significant transition points in your code and analyze performance per frame.
GPU analysis: Analyze applications using a Graphics Processing Unit (GPU) and correlate activities on both the CPU and GPU (available for VTune Amplifier XE on Windows and VTune Amplifier for Systems on Android systems with Intel HD Graphics).
Source analysis: View source with performance data attributed per source line to explore possible causes of an issue.
Comparison analysis: Compare performance analysis results for several application runs to localize the performance changes you got after optimization.
Remote analysis: Configure the data collection on the host system (Linux, OS X, or Windows) and run analysis on a target system (Linux, Android, or Windows).
Start data collection paused: Click the Start Paused button on the command bar to start the application without collecting performance data and click the Resume button to enable the collection at the right moment.
Grouping: Group your data by different granularity in the grid view to analyze the problem from different angles.
Viewpoints: Choose among preset configurations of windows and panes available for the analysis result. This helps focus on particular performance problems.
Hot keys to start and stop the analysis: Use a batch file to create hot keys to start and stop a particular analysis.
Because the VTune Amplifier requires specific knowledge of assembly-level instructions, its analysis may not operate correctly if a program (target) is compiled to generate non-Intel architecture instructions. In this case, run the analysis with a target executable compiled to generate only Intel instructions. After you finish using the VTune Amplifier, you can use optimizing compiler options that generate non-Intel architecture instructions.