HOW: Analysis Types
Intel® VTune™
provides a set of pre-configured analysis types you may start with to address your particular performance optimization goals.
Profiler
When you create a project, the
VTune
opens the
Profiler
Configure Analysis
window that prompts you to specify WHAT you want to analyze (an application, process, or a whole system), a system WHERE you plan to run the analysis, and select HOW you need to run the analysis.

Click the header in the
HOW
pane to open an analysis tree. Select from an analysis type from one of these groups:
Performance Snapshot
analysis:
- Use Performance Snapshot to get an overview of issues that affect the performance of an application on your system. The analysis is a good starting point that recommends areas for deeper focus. You also get guidance on other analysis types to consider running next.
Algorithm
analysis:
- Use Anomaly Detection (preview) to identify performance anomalies in frequently recurring intervals of code like loop iterations. Perform fine-grained analysis at the microsecond level.
- Memory Consumption is best for analyzing memory consumption by your app, its distinct memory objects, and their allocation stacks. This analysis is supported for Linux targets only.
Microarchitecture
analysis:
- Microarchitecture Exploration (formerly known as General Exploration) is best for identifying the CPU pipeline stage (front-end, back-end, and so on) and hardware units responsible for your hardware bottlenecks.
- Memory Access is best for memory-bound apps to determine which level of the memory hierarchy is impacting your performance by reviewing CPU cache and main memory usage, including possible NUMA issues.
Parallelism
analysis:
- Threading is best for visualizing thread parallelism on available cores, locating causes of low concurrency, and identifying serial bottlenecks in your code.
- Use HPC Performance Characterization to understand how your compute-intensive application is using the CPU, memory, and floating point unit (FPU) resources. SeeAnalyzing an OpenMP* and MPI Application tutorial: Linux.
I/O
analysis:
- Input and Output analysis monitors utilization of the IO subsystems, CPU and processor buses.
Accelerators
analysis:
- GPU Offload (preview) is targeted for applications using a Graphics Processing Unit (GPU) for rendering, video processing, and computations. It helps you identify whether your application is CPU or GPU bound.
- GPU Compute/Media Hotspots (preview) is targeted for GPU-bound applications and helps analyze GPU kernel execution per code line and identify performance issues caused by memory latency or inefficient kernel algorithms.
- CPU/FPGA Interaction analysis explores FPGA utilization for each FPGA accelerator and identifies the most time-consuming FPGA computing tasks.
Platform
analysis:
- System Overview is a driverless event-based sampling analysis that monitors a general behavior of your target system and identify platform-level factors that limit performance.
- Platform Profiler analysis collects data on a deployed system running a full load over an extended period of time with insights into overall system configuration, performance, and behavior. The collection is run on a command prompt outside ofVTuneand results are viewed in a web browser.Profiler
A
PREVIEW FEATURE
may or may not appear in a future production release. It is available for your use in the hopes that you will provide feedback on its usefulness and help determine its future. Data collected with a preview feature is not guaranteed to be backward compatible with future releases.
Advanced users can create a
custom analysis using the data collectors provided by
VTune
, or combining the collector of
Profiler
VTune
with another
custom collector.
Profiler