Start SOTA

manuscrit/20_foundations/30_sota.tex

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 \section{State of the art}\label{sec:sota}
+
+Performance models for CPUs have been previously studied, and applied to
+static code performance analysis.
+
+\medskip
+
+Since 1996, Agner Fog has been maintaining tables of values useful for
+optimisation purposes for x86 instructions~\cite{AgnerFog}. These tables, still
+maintained and updated today, are often considered very accurate. The main
+issue, however, is that those tables are generated through the use of
+hand-picked instructions and benchmarks, depending on specific hardware
+counters and features specific to some CPU manufacturers. As such, while these
+tables are very helpful on the supported CPUs for x86, the method does not
+scale to the abundance of CPUs on which such tables may be useful ---~for
+instance, ARM processors, embedded platforms, etc.
+
+\medskip
+
+Following the work of Agner Fog, Andreas Abel and Jan Reineke have designed the
+\uopsinfo{} framework~\cite{uopsinfo}, striving to automate the previous
+methodology. Their work, providing data tables for the vast majority of
+instructions on many recent Intel microarchitectures, has been recently
+enhanced to also support AMD architectures. It is, however, still limited to
+% TODO HW counters, relevant microarchs