During the Microsoft Windows 10 Devices event, Panos Panay - whilst talking about the Surface Books graphics said the following:
It's for that coder, using the latest Visual Studio where they can compile using the GPU and CPU at the same time and not lose a minute (Video)
This could just be a throwaway comment, but given that it is possible to do CPU type activities on the GPU (CUDA?), I wondered if he was actually talking about a genuine way to make Visual Studio use both the CPU and the GPU to perform application compilation.
Looking online, I can't see an obvious answer. Is this possible?
If they use something like AMP underneath then that is exactly what it is designed to do... use CPU and GPU (heterogeneous computing).
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I recently changed my CPU to AMD Ryzen 3700X 8 cores and motherboard to B450 TOMAHAWK MAX MS-7C02.
The problem: Visual studio utilizes only up to 5-10% CPU.
What I tried:
Changing parameters in BIOS(Changed base frequency, turned of Cool'n'Quiet)
Turned off power saving mode in Control Panel settings
Tried CPU on "stress" software (HeavyLoad) - CPU runs 100% there.
I tried to search for similar cases and solutions, but I couldn't find anything related to a problem like that. It really bugs me and I'm not sure why such problem could occur.
Any help is welcome and very appreciated!
My guess is that Visual Studio is doing something that is not multithreaded and is therefore only using one core instead of all 8 cores.
Are you compiling code in VS? If so, there may be a VS setting to make the compiler use multiple threads.
I'm trying to do some profiling on my OpenGL ES code. Somewhere in my GPU pipeline (a shader I believe) is causing a huge delay. Which is the best profiler I can use? Is this one a good option? is there one I can use directly within Visual Studio?
If you have a GPU performance issue on IOS, the best is to use XCode tools to profile it directly on device, running the app from Xcode and then doing a frame capture to look at the timings for each draw call / the number of cycles used by each shader (more info here)
You can also profile on Windows if you are also able to simulate your graphics pipeline in classic OpenGL in your Windows version, but this may not be a good idea as the iPhone's GPU is very different than a classic desktop GPU so the bottleneck might not be the same on Windows than on IOS.
To profile on Windows I would suggest using either Nvidia PerfKit (if you have a Nvidia card) or AMD's GPU PerfStudio if you have an AMD card.
There is also RenderDoc which is a nice tool but not sure if it provides much profiling information (it is more for debugging graphics issues than profiling)
I have my complex PyOpenCL app with a lot of buffers creations, kernel templating and etc. I want to profile my app on GPU to see what is the bottle neck in my case.
Is it possible to use some gpu profiler with PyOpenCl app? For example CodeXL.
P.S. I know about event profiling but it isn't enough.
Yes, it is possible. Look here: http://devgurus.amd.com/message/1282742
I am planning to build a new very fast developer computer under Visual Studio 2012 and Windows 7 64 bit. I am getting all fast components like SSD's and 16G RAM. I was wondering if Visual Studio 2012 is built to utilize all available CPU cores. I am trying to make a decision whether to get an expensive 6 core I7 CPU or a lesser expensive quad core CPU in terms of whether they make a difference in compile time since that's what takes the most time when I am not coding.
Note: There's a similar post from 2009 but I wanted to know if VS2012 has much better performance than VS 2010 in terms of cores utilization.
I am balking at the $1000+ price of the I7 Extreme.
I would recommend getting a non extreme latest generation i7 with a decent SSD and double the RAM. If you trace to the file system what visual studio is actually doing, you will see that it is reading and writing a great number of files. Much of these files are cached during the second build in a row, but an SSD and enough RAM seems to be the most important speed-up component in the equation and a quad core i5 or i7 is sufficient preferably with hyper-threading and VT technology in case you want to run 64 bit virtual machines later.
I have also noticed decent compilation performance upgrades from changing an old computer from IDE to AHCI in the bios following the proper guide.
Visual Studio has the option of choosing number of maximum parallel builds - they use as many CPU cores as you wish.
However, you shouldn't really focus too much on this option when deciding which CPU to buy. Newest Intel processors use the Turbo Boost to speed up processes which are using less than maximum number of cores. Also, the Extreme Series are very expensive without much of a performance gain. The lower models can usually be overclocked and match the more expensive models.
If you really feel, however, that your compilation times are too high, you should take a look at IncrediBuild - I've used it myself and must say that it really speeds up the build process. It is able to really understand your system specification and use all the resources possible, and also use remote build servers as well.
If you are building large C++ projects you need as many cores as you can get!
For example building Qt 4.8.3 did take less than two hours on my eight core machine with a SSD drive - o an 2 core machine with an HDD it took more than 20 hours
With BlueGo you can measure how long it takes to build Qt or boost on your system - so you can use it as a benchmark to find out how well suited your system is for building large C++ projects.
Why does memory matter so much when VS 2012 is only 32 bit? Maybe if you have 10 different project open. Otherwise 8 GB should be more than enough right? Maybe ram speed is the more important, but i also read that anything over 1600MHz is a waste. I'm guessing the best thing is a SSD, and the PCI Express card SSD like OCZ makes would be the best thing.
Is there any small tool that gives me access to the data gathered by the Intel CPU Counters (like L1/L2 cache misses, branch prediction failures ... you know there are hunderts of them on modern Core2 CPU's).
It must work on Windows (while being able to use it with Solaris, FreeBSD, Linux, MacOSX would of course be nice).
Check out the Intel PCM (Performance Counter Monitor) tool which does exactly what you want to do.
Link: https://software.intel.com/en-us/articles/intel-performance-counter-monitor-a-better-way-to-measure-cpu-utilization
Intel PCM provides a rich API that allows you to instrument your code. Furthermore, to date, PCM is the only tool to read uncore events too.
This thread seems a little old but if you're still interested, I wrote a howto recently on this topic using nothing more than rdmsr and wrmsr in Linux. It only deals with the performance counters on an Intel uncore for Westmere, but the process I described might help you figure out what you need if you haven't already. I'm sure Windows has some equivalent program or function call to RDMSR and WRMSR. The problem is you need to be ring 0 (kernel mode) to read MSRs. I have no idea how to do that in Windows. I won't be able to help with any Windows questions but may be able to answer some MSR-related questions if you have any. I'm by no means an expert though.
PAPI is a very promising lead, however, I believe they discontinued support for Windows (and therefore .NET C#) quite a few years ago.
On the windows front, Visual Studio 2010 Premium comes with performance explorer. If you run any project or binary in instrumentation mode, you can get access to hardware events such as instructions retired.
The results can be somewhat mixed and inconsistent depending external factors, but it integrates with Visual Studio nicely and you get detailed counts (avg, maximum, total) on a per method/module level.
Intel V-tune performance analyzer also exposes these natively. I haven't played with this tool yet but it might be a more flexible API than what Visual Studio 2010 exposes.
You didn't write of your are looking for a application or for a library.
For Windows there is Intel VTune. But this not exactly an small tool. For linux I have used oprofile, which works without kernel patches.
On OS X, Shark lets you get data from the PMCs. I'm not sure what's available on Windows other than Intel's tools (VTune, as mentioned by drhirsch).
Try this
http://icl.cs.utk.edu/papi/
It is a full library that allows you to read any CPU counters data, works both on Windows and Linux [and other OS]
This thread looks pretty old. But still, all the above mentioned counters are available at Intel PCM .These counters can be used as a Microsoft Perfmon plugin or a command prompt interface. The Intel PCM gives informations like L2 and L3 cache hit ratio, cache misses etc.