The Time Stamp Counter was once a high-resolution, low-overhead way for a program to get CPU timing information. … See more

Intel processor families increment the time-stamp counter differently:
• For Pentium M processors (family [06H], models [09H, 0DH]); for Pentium 4 processors, Intel Xeon processors (family [0FH], mod… See more

An operating system may provide methods that both use and don't use the RDTSC instruction for time keeping, under administrator control. For example, on some versions of the Linux kernel, seccomp sandboxin… See more

The time stamp counter can be used to time instructions accurately which can be exploited in the Meltdown and Spectre security vulnerabilities. However, if this is not available other counters or timers can be used, a… See more

Other processors also have registers which count CPU clock cycles, but with different names. For instance, on the AVR32, it is called the Performance Clock Counter (PCCNT) register. SPARC V9 provides the TICK register. … See more

• High Precision Event Timer (HPET) See more

• cycle.h - C code to read the high-resolution timer on many CPUs and compilers.
• AMD engineer on TSC drift in AMD processors See more