SHORT L2 cache miss rate/ratio EVENTSET PMC1 PM_L2_LD_MISS PMC2 PM_L2_LD_DISP PMC3 PM_L2_ST_DISP PMC4 PM_RUN_INST_CMPL PMC5 PM_RUN_CYC METRICS Runtime (RDTSC) [s] time CPI PMC5/PMC4 L2 request rate (PMC2+PMC3)/PMC4 L2 load miss rate PMC1/PMC4 L2 load miss ratio PMC1/(PMC2+PMC3) LONG Formulas: L2 request rate = (PM_L2_LD_DISP+PM_L2_ST_DISP)/PM_RUN_INST_CMPL L2 load miss rate = (PM_L2_LD_MISS)/PM_RUN_INST_CMPL L2 load miss ratio = (PM_L2_LD_MISS)/(PM_L2_LD_DISP+PM_L2_ST_DISP) - 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 in average per instruction. The L2 miss rate gives a measure how often it was necessary to get cachelines from memory. And finally L2 load miss ratio tells you how many of your memory references required a cacheline 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.