Getting cpu cycles using RDTSC - why does the value of RDTSC always increase?

Question

I want to get the CPU cycles at a specific point. I use this function at that point:

static __inline__ unsigned long long rdtsc(void)
{
    unsigned long lon         


        

Answer 1

There's lots of confusing and/or wrong information about the TSC out there, so I thought I'd try to clear some of it up.

When Intel first introduced the TSC (in original Pentium CPUs) it was clearly documented to count cycles (and not time). However, back then CPUs mostly ran at a fixed frequency, so some people ignored the documented behaviour and used it to measure time instead (most notably, Linux kernel developers). Their code broke in later CPUs that don't run at a fixed frequency (due to power management, etc). Around that time other CPU manufacturers (AMD, Cyrix, Transmeta, etc) were confused and some implemented TSC to measure cycles and some implemented it so it measured time, and some made it configurable (via. an MSR).

Then "multi-chip" systems became more common for servers; and even later multi-core was introduced. This led to minor differences between TSC values on different cores (due to different startup times); but more importantly it also led to major differences between TSC values on different CPUs caused by CPUs running at different speeds (due to power management and/or other factors).

People that were trying to use it wrong from the start (people who used it to measure time and not cycles) complained a lot, and eventually convinced CPU manufacturers to standardise on making the TSC measure time and not cycles.

Of course this was a mess - e.g. it takes a lot of code just to determine what the TSC actually measures if you support all 80x86 CPUs; and different power management technologies (including things like SpeedStep, but also things like sleep states) may effect TSC in different ways on different CPUs; so AMD introduced a "TSC invariant" flag in CPUID to tell the OS that the TSC can be used to measure time correctly.

All recent Intel and AMD CPUs have been like this for a while now - TSC counts time and doesn't measure cycles at all. This means if you want to measure cycles you had to use (model specific) performance monitoring counters. Unfortunately the performance monitoring counters are an even worse mess (due to their model specific nature and convoluted configuration).