I am currently benchmarking some code using PAPI.
One of the preset values I obtain is the PAPI_L1_ICA i.e. the amount of instruction cache accesses performed to the L1 instruction cache.
As far as I can see the code is dominated by this, since the running time of the algorithm and the PAPI_L1_ICA seems to be more or less equivalent, while other metrics such as branch mispredictions, cache misses, tlb misses and CPU instructions, generally does not explain the behaviour of the running time.
My question is, what defines an action that triggers an L1 instruction cache access? From my measurements the accesses are in the order of 150.000 while for example the amount of completed instructions PAPI_TOT_INS are only approximately 10.000. Should they not be somewhat equal?
