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Software Optimization: Four real-life Streamline use cases (Part 3)

Guilherme Marshall
1 minute read time.
Benchmarking -  ARM DS-5™ Streamline is designed for software and system analysis (see previous posts on Timeline analysis and software profiling), and that is where all its power features apply, but many developers use it for benchmarking because of its ease of use.

  In the Timeline View you see the start and end of threads as well as "events" that you can define in your application with printf-style annotations. So, for instance, in the Xaos example report provided in the DS-5 installation we have annotated different stages of fractal computation and we can measure how long it takes to complete each one of these stages

                            

  Benchmarking has an obvious use: measure the time to complete a certain task before and after changes in the software, and check whether these have resulted in an improvement or not.

  Streamline is actually pretty good for benchmarking because:
  • It is really easy to use. Once the Streamline gator driver has been integrated in the target's software, running Streamline only requires you to type the IP address of the target and push a button on the GUI
  • You can capture data for as long as you wish and stream it to your host PC for processing. This can be seconds, minutes or hours
  • You can script it and drive it from the command line or batch files for test automation
When Streamline is used together with the Energy Probe you can measure the energy consumed by your target in order to complete a task. For designs where low power and battery life are critical the goal may be to finish the task within a certain time with the lowest possible voltage and clock frequency settings, rather than try to finish it as quickly as possible. The ability to benchmark total energy consumption and easily measure time between events is critical for success.
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