How To Download Cpuid Hwmonitor

[Joslyn Moreci]

Inthe x86 architecture, the CPUID instruction (identified by a CPUID opcode) is a processor supplementary instruction (its name derived from CPU Identification) allowing software to discover details of the processor. It was introduced by Intel in 1993 with the launch of the Pentium and SL-enhanced 486 processors.[1]

Prior to the general availability of the CPUID instruction, programmers would write esoteric machine code which exploited minor differences in CPU behavior in order to determine the processor make and model.[2][3][4][5] With the introduction of the 80386 processor, EDX on reset indicated the revision but this was only readable after reset and there was no standard way for applications to read the value.

While the CPUID instruction is specific to the x86 architecture, other architectures (like ARM) often provide on-chip registers which can be read in prescribed ways to obtain the same sorts of information provided by the x86 CPUID instruction.

In assembly language, the CPUID instruction takes no parameters as CPUID implicitly uses the EAX register to determine the main category of information returned. In Intel's more recent terminology, this is called the CPUID leaf. CPUID should be called with EAX = 0 first, as this will store in the EAX register the highest EAX calling parameter (leaf) that the CPU implements.

CPUID leaves greater than 3 but less than 80000000 are accessible only when the model-specific registers have IA32_MISC_ENABLE.BOOT_NT4 [bit 22] = 0 (which is so by default). As the name suggests, Windows NT 4.0 until SP6 did not boot properly unless this bit was set,[6] but later versions of Windows do not need it, so basic leaves greater than 4 can be assumed visible on current Windows systems. As of April 2024[update], basic valid leaves go up to 23h, but the information returned by some leaves are not disclosed in the publicly available documentation, i.e. they are "reserved".

For instance, on a GenuineIntel processor values returned in EBX is 0x756e6547, EDX is 0x49656e69 and ECX is 0x6c65746e. The following example code displays the vendor ID string as well as the highest calling parameter that the CPU implements.

On some processors, it is possible to modify the Manufacturer ID string reported by CPUID.(EAX=0) by writing a new ID string to particular MSRs (Model-specific registers) using the WRMSR instruction. This has been used on non-Intel processors to enable features and optimizations that have been disabled in software for CPUs that don't return the GenuineIntel ID string.[19] Processors that are known to possess such MSRs include:

This returns the CPU's stepping, model, and family information in register EAX (also called the signature of a CPU), feature flags in registers EDX and ECX, and additional feature info in register EBX.[27]

In older documentation, this bit is often listed as a "Hyper-threading technology"[54] flag - however, while this flag is a prerequisite for Hyper-Threading support, it does not by itself indicate support for Hyper-Threading and it has been set on many CPUs that do not feature any form of multi-threading technology.[55]

On processors that support this leaf, calling CPUID with EAX=2 will cause the bottom byte of EAX to be set to 01h[a] and the remaining 15 bytes of EAX/EBX/ECX/EDX to be filled with 15 descriptors, one byte each. These descriptors provide information about the processor's caches, TLBs and prefetch. This is typically one cache or TLB per descriptor, but some descriptor-values provide other information as well - in particular, 00h is used for an empty descriptor, FFh indicates that the leaf does not contain valid cache information and that leaf 4h should be used instead, and FEh indicates that the leaf does not contain valid TLB information and that leaf 18h should be used instead. The descriptors may appear in any order.

The table below provides, for known descriptor values, a condensed description of the cache or TLB indicated by that descriptor value (or other information, where that applies). The suffixes used in the table are:

This returns the processor's serial number. The processor serial number was introduced on Intel Pentium III, but due to privacy concerns, this feature is no longer implemented on later models (the PSN feature bit is always cleared). Transmeta's Efficeon and Crusoe processors also provide this feature. AMD CPUs however, do not implement this feature in any CPU models.

For Intel Pentium III CPUs, the serial number is returned in the EDX:ECX registers. For Transmeta Efficeon CPUs, it is returned in the EBX:EAX registers. And for Transmeta Crusoe CPUs, it is returned in the EBX register only.

These two leaves are used to provide information about the cache hierarchy levels available to the processor core on which the CPUID instruction is run. Leaf 4 is used on Intel processors and leaf 8000001Dh is used on AMD processors - they both return data in EAX, EBX, ECX and EDX, using the same data format except that leaf 4 returns a few additional fields that are considered "reserved" for leaf 8000001Dh. They both provide CPU cache information in a series of sub-leaves selected by ECX - to get information about all the cache levels, it is necessary to invoke CPUID repeatedly, with EAX=4 or 8000001Dh and ECX set to increasing values starting from 0 (0,1,2,...) until a sub-leaf not describing any caches (EAX[4:0]=0) is found. The sub-leaves that do return cache information may appear in any order, but all of them will appear before the first sub-leaf not describing any caches.

These two leaves are used for processor topology (thread, core, package) and cache hierarchy enumeration in Intel multi-core (and hyperthreaded) processors.[73] As of 2013[update] AMD does not use these leaves but has alternate ways of doing the core enumeration.[74]

Unlike most other CPUID leaves, leaf Bh will return different values in EDX depending on which logical processor the CPUID instruction runs; the value returned in EDX is actually the x2APIC id of the logical processor. The x2APIC id space is not continuously mapped to logical processors, however; there can be gaps in the mapping, meaning that some intermediate x2APIC ids don't necessarily correspond to any logical processor. Additional information for mapping the x2APIC ids to cores is provided in the other registers. Although the leaf Bh has sub-leaves (selected by ECX as described further below), the value returned in EDX is only affected by the logical processor on which the instruction is running but not by the subleaf.

The processor(s) topology exposed by leaf Bh is a hierarchical one, but with the strange caveat that the order of (logical) levels in this hierarchy doesn't necessarily correspond to the order in the physical hierarchy (SMT/core/package). However, every logical level can be queried as an ECX subleaf (of the Bh leaf) for its correspondence to a "level type", which can be either SMT, core, or "invalid". The level id space starts at 0 and is continuous, meaning that if a level id is invalid, all higher level ids will also be invalid. The level type is returned in bits 15:08 of ECX, while the number of logical processors at the level queried is returned in EBX. Finally, the connection between these levels and x2APIC ids is returned in EAX[4:0] as the number of bits that the x2APIC id must be shifted in order to obtain a unique id at the next level.

As an example, a dual-core Westmere processor capable of hyperthreading (thus having two cores and four threads in total) could have x2APIC ids 0, 1, 4 and 5 for its four logical processors. Leaf Bh (=EAX), subleaf 0 (=ECX) of CPUID could for instance return 100h in ECX, meaning that level 0 describes the SMT (hyperthreading) layer, and return 2 in EBX because there are two logical processors (SMT units) per physical core. The value returned in EAX for this 0-subleaf should be 1 in this case, because shifting the aforementioned x2APIC ids to the right by one bit gives a unique core number (at the next level of the level id hierarchy) and erases the SMT id bit inside each core. A simpler way to interpret this information is that the last bit (bit number 0) of the x2APIC id identifies the SMT/hyperthreading unit inside each core in our example. Advancing to subleaf 1 (by making another call to CPUID with EAX=Bh and ECX=1) could for instance return 201h in ECX, meaning that this is a core-type level, and 4 in EBX because there are 4 logical processors in the package; EAX returned could be any value greater than 3, because it so happens that bit number 2 is used to identify the core in the x2APIC id. Note that bit number 1 of the x2APIC id is not used in this example. However, EAX returned at this level could well be 4 (and it happens to be so on a Clarkdale Core i3 5x0) because that also gives a unique id at the package level (=0 obviously) when shifting the x2APIC id by 4 bits. Finally, you may wonder what the EAX=4 leaf can tell us that we didn't find out already. In EAX[31:26] it returns the APIC mask bits reserved for a package; that would be 111b in our example because bits 0 to 2 are used for identifying logical processors inside this package, but bit 1 is also reserved although not used as part of the logical processor identification scheme. In other words, APIC ids 0 to 7 are reserved for the package, even though half of these values don't map to a logical processor.

The cache hierarchy of the processor is explored by looking at the sub-leaves of leaf 4. The APIC ids are also used in this hierarchy to convey information about how the different levels of cache are shared by the SMT units and cores. To continue our example, the L2 cache, which is shared by SMT units of the same core but not between physical cores on the Westmere is indicated by EAX[26:14] being set to 1, while the information that the L3 cache is shared by the whole package is indicated by setting those bits to (at least) 111b. The cache details, including cache type, size, and associativity are communicated via the other registers on leaf 4.

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