Microarchitectural profiling of C++ and assembly code on MIPS

Question

As part of course project, I need to analyze a piece of C++ code for performance and find out which parts of the Computer Architecture (MIPS or x86) are mostly utilized while running the code and is possibly a bottleneck for the performance. I am looking at various Profilers for analyzing the performance and came across SimpleScalar which is a great tool but sadly only works with C code.

Since I am more familiar with MIPS architecture it would be great if there's a tool like SimpleScalar for simulating and profiling C++ code for MIPS. I am looking at the performance critical parts like branch, cache, instruction set, addressing modes etc. If not, mention of any tool which can do the similar kind of analysis for x86 architectures would be great as well.

(Just to clarify, I'm not looking for any old profiler, but for one that understands the CPU microarchitecture and knows what parts of the CPU are taken advantage of or underused.)

Answer 1

CACTI has detailed low-level simulation of cache.

SESC is a cycle accurate computer architecture simulator that supports MIPS. SESC includes CACTI.

Answer 2

I doubt that what you want is possible. C++ is the language, but it still needs to be compiled to the target architecture. The optimisations (or the lack of them) will determine a lot of your performance criteria like cache use, etc. So I guess you need to look for machine level profilers (Hopefully they support the debug format of your compiler, so you see source code context).

Answer 3

My understanding is that SimpleScalar can simulate and profile MIPS machine code, no matter what the original language it was compiled from. (The source-level debugger "DLite!" that comes with SimpleScalar may only support a few languages, but it sounds like you don't need to "debug" your code.)