Retired Branches

PAPI_BR_INS

branches:u

The retired branches performance counter is another one that in theory should be deterministic, but in practice this is not the case (mainly on x86)

x86 and x86_64

Retired branch counts on x86 in general include at least one extra instruction each time a hardware interrupt or page fault happens, even if only user space code is being monitored.

On x86 the non-determinism is related to the hardware interrupt and page-fault count, similar to the way the
retired instruction count behaves.

POWER


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