Introducing the Ampere Performance Toolkit (APT)

As you seek optimal efficiency and performance for your software, you understand that getting the most out of modern processors requires understanding the underlying hardware. At Ampere®, we recognize that the path to true optimization requires instilling performance discipline, consistent and predictable performance evaluation, and using the right tools and methods to identify and solve problems.

That’s why we created the Ampere Performance Tool Kit (APT). The fundamental intent of the toolkit is to help you follow a disciplined methodology: establish a consistent and predictable benchmarking approach, eliminate system-level bottlenecks, analyze application bottlenecks, and finally perform microarchitectural analysis. This allows for more effective testing and optimized cycles.

We’ve expanded the original APT beyond a single tool, now to include four powerful specialized tools designed to deliver comprehensive insights into the performance of your hardware and software. This is an open source solution designed to enable customers and developers to take a systematic approach to performance analysis and optimization.

• The Ampere Portability Advisor (APA) focuses on advising on software transition or optimization to the Arm64 architecture. This tool can save time and effort in the porting and migration process. By analyzing the build environment and source code for known code patterns and dependency libraries, it provides detailed reports with incompatibilities and recommendations. This guide allows developers to navigate the complexities of transitioning between architectures more efficiently, speeding up the overall migration process.
• The Ampere System Profiler (ASP) provides profiling capabilities that can be used for system-level workload characterization, a first step to root-causing performance issues. ASP can be used to study operating system-level metrics, including CPU utilization, CPU power, networking, I/O, and NUMA effects, helping you resolve system-level bottlenecks before delving into code and microarchitectural-level optimizations.
• The Ampere PMU Profiler (APP) focuses on deep efficiency metrics at the microarchitectural level by collecting Performance Monitoring Unit (PMU) events such as instructions per cycle, cache miss rate, and branch prediction analysis. Once system-level optimizations are complete, the application is instrumental in linking software code execution to hardware effects.
• The Ampere Performance Benchmarking Kit (APKB) provides a standardized and automated way to run and compare applications. This framework makes it easier and faster to configure and run performance tests repeatably across bare metal, virtualized, and cloud environments using a mature, automated framework with the most popular configurations. The APKB project includes numerous benchmarks and workloads, from common benchmarks such as multichase (memory latency/bandwidth), FIO (I/O characteristics), Netperf (networking), and SPECCPU Integer, to applications such as Cassandra, MySQL, Redis, and NGINX, and finally AI inference using large language models LLaMA and Qwen.

A compass and a microscope

Ampere Performance Toolkit acts as a sophisticated compass and microscope for developers. THAT and APKB They’re like a compass: they ensure you’re pointing in the right direction to transfer and run applications repeatably. Meanwhile, ASP and APPLICATION They are like microscopes, allowing you to focus and zoom in on problem areas to resolve performance issues.

An important step forward in performance optimization

Ampere Performance Toolkit represents a significant advancement in simplifying software portability, benchmarking, and optimization. By streamlining the migration process, reducing development costs, and enabling access to a broader ecosystem, the toolset enables developers to leverage the benefits of the AArch64 architecture more quickly and effectively.

Get started today

We invite you to download and try Ampere Performance Toolkit from Ampere Performance Toolkit Repository.

To learn more about our developer efforts and find best practices, visit Ampere Developer Center and join the conversation on the Ampere Developer Community.