Neoverse -V2 Support to Intel Perfspect

We recently worked on extending Intel Perfspect (https://github.com/Whileone-Techsoft/PerfSpect/tree/Neoverse-native-support), a robust, command-line performance analysis tool that implements the Top-Down Microarchitecture Analysis Method (TMAM). It fully supports the Arm Neoverse-V2 architectures.

This project required mapping the Performance Monitoring Unit (PMU) events on the ARM cores to the metrics of TMAM methodology. We can now get the Level 1 breakdown (Frontend Bound, Backend Bound, Retiring, Lost) to pinpoint the bottlenecks on respective systems, which was previously incompatible with this tool. 

Through debugging the code, it became possible to generate the continuous series graphs to understand if the bottleneck. This extension of Perfspect for Arm (our code allows native compilation on ARM) allowed the capture of the CPU utilization HeatMap generated in Telemetry reports, which shows the distribution of work across all cores over time. 

The challenge was mapping the Arm events to the TMAM formulae, and then correctly comparing the captured values through the modified Perfspect tool with the values that were manually calculated using the formulae. The key learnings from this project were quickly adapting to a new programming language like Go(Golang) and making significant changes in the code to get the appropriate results, also adding to the knowledge of TMAM methodology and the specific challenges of cross-architecture analysis, particularly in translating PMU events from the Intel ecosystem to Arm's Neoverse-V2 core.