Oh man, this is major. I would’ve loved to have something like that 10 years ago when CPU was a bit more precious. Still very useful today, just not to the same extent.
I wish more devs continued to realize that CPU is precious. One executable running in isolation is only limited by how fast it can consume clock cycles, but we now have hundreds of executables each running dozens or hundreds of functions all the time. One unoptimized IO function can cause stutters across the whole system as it runs. Thousands of unoptimized IO functions can....
Well, we all know. We use systems like that daily.
Didnt know this existed, interesting, but certainly could be useful at a forensic level, have had tools to highlight slow running multi threaded code in apps for probably about 15years now, but this takes it to a whole new level.
From their manuals
"The Intel® Processor Trace (IPT) works similar to the LBR and BTS feature of Ix86 based cores (see “CPU specific Onchip Trace Commands” (debugger_x86.pdf)"
I knew about the debugger on ARM cpu's like the Rpi, didnt know about Intel having one, but its suggested AMD dont have one either, so there might be some security reason for that, depends on if the trace is just output only or whether its possible to use things like SOIC clips to alter bits and bytes in realtime, but like slowed down not normal cpu clock speeds.
