R1x000 Event Counters
The R1x000 processor family allows extensive performance monitoring with counters that can be triggered by 32 events:
- R10000 has 2 event counters
- R12000 has 4 event counters
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The counters are incremented when an event happens in the processor (e.g. cache miss) and the event is selected by the user.
The first counter can be triggered by the events 0-15,
the second counter is incremented in response to events 15-31.
R12000 has 2 additional counters that allow to monitor conditional events (i.e. events based on previous events).
User access to the counters is through a software library or shell level tools provided by the IRIX OS.