SHORT L2 cache miss rate/ratio EVENTSET FIXC0 INSTR_RETIRED_ANY FIXC1 CPU_CLK_UNHALTED_CORE FIXC2 CPU_CLK_UNHALTED_REF PMC0 MEM_UOPS_RETIRED_L2_HIT_LOADS PMC1 MEM_UOPS_RETIRED_L2_MISS_LOADS METRICS Runtime (RDTSC) [s] time Runtime unhalted [s] FIXC1*inverseClock Clock [MHz] 1.E-06*(FIXC1/FIXC2)/inverseClock CPI FIXC1/FIXC0 L2 request rate (PMC0+PMC1)/FIXC0 L2 miss rate PMC1/FIXC0 L2 miss ratio PMC1/(PMC0+PMC1) LONG Formulas: L2 request rate = (MEM_UOPS_RETIRED_L2_HIT_LOADS+MEM_UOPS_RETIRED_L2_MISS_LOADS)/INSTR_RETIRED_ANY L2 miss rate = MEM_UOPS_RETIRED_L2_MISS_LOADS/INSTR_RETIRED_ANY L2 miss ratio = MEM_UOPS_RETIRED_L2_MISS_LOADS/(MEM_UOPS_RETIRED_L2_HIT_LOADS+MEM_UOPS_RETIRED_L2_MISS_LOADS) - This group measures the locality of your data accesses with regard to the L2 cache. L2 request rate tells you how data intensive your code is or how many data accesses you have on average per instruction. The L2 miss rate gives a measure how often it was necessary to get cache lines from memory. And finally L2 miss ratio tells you how many of your memory references required a cache line to be loaded from a higher level. While the data cache miss rate might be given by your algorithm you should try to get data cache miss ratio as low as possible by increasing your cache reuse.