The complexity of computing systems has tremendously increased over the last decades. Hierarchical cache subsystems, non-uniform memory, simultaneous multithreading and out-of-order execution have a huge impact on the performance and compute capacity of modern processors.

Software that understands and dynamically adjusts to resource utilization of modern processors has performance and power advantages. The Intel® Performance Counter Monitor provides sample C++ routines and utilities to estimate the internal resource utilization of the latest Intel® Xeon® and Core™ processors and gain a significant performance boost

When the CPU utilization does not tell you the utilization of the CPU
CPU utilization number obtained from operating system (OS) is a metric that has been used for many purposes like product sizing, compute capacity planning, job scheduling, and so on. The current implementation of this metric (the number that the UNIX* “top” utility and the Windows* task manager report) shows the portion of time slots that the CPU scheduler in the OS could assign to execution of running programs or the OS itself; the rest of the time is idle. For compute-bound workloads, the CPU utilization metric calculated this way predicted the remaining CPU capacity very well for architectures of 80ies that had much more uniform and predictable performance compared to modern systems. The advances in computer architecture made this algorithm an unreliable metric because of introduction of multi core and multi CPU systems, multi-level caches, non-uniform memory, simultaneous multithreading (SMT), pipelining, out-of-order execution, etc

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