Assembly CPU frequency measuring algorithm

Question

What are the common algorithms being used to measure the processor frequency?

Answer 1

One way on x86 Intel CPU's since Pentium would be to use two samplings of the RDTSC instruction with a delay loop of known wall time, eg:

#include 
#include 
#include 

uint64_t rdtsc(void) {
    uint64_t result;
    __asm__ __volatile__ ("rdtsc" : "=A" (result));
    return result;
}

int main(void) {
    uint64_t ts0, ts1;    
    ts0 = rdtsc();
    sleep(1);
    ts1 = rdtsc();    
    printf("clock frequency = %llu\n", ts1 - ts0);
    return 0;
}

(on 32-bit platforms with GCC)

RDTSC is available in ring 3 if the TSC flag in CR4 is set, which is common but not guaranteed. One shortcoming of this method is that it is vulnerable to frequency scaling changes affecting the result if they happen inside the delay. To mitigate that you could execute code that keeps the CPU busy and constantly poll the system time to see if your delay period has expired, to keep the CPU in the highest frequency state available.