How to measure performance on the PIC32

First, use MPLab Harmony Configurator 3to enable the CORETIMERmodule for your project. No special configuration is neccessary.

The PIC32 Core Timer always runs at half the CPU frequency. For example, if the CPU is running at 200 MHz, the Core Timer will run at 100 MHz.

You an then use

uint32_t CORETIMER_CounterGet();

to get the current value of the core timer. Additionally, you can get the frequency of the Core Timer in Hz using

uint32_t CORETIMER_FrequencyGet();

Use the following snippet to measure how long it takes to run a specific function:

uint32_t t0 = CORETIMER_CounterGet();
run_my_func();
uint32_t t1 = CORETIMER_CounterGet();

After that, you can compute the number of seconds it took to run the function using e.g.

uint32_t tdelta = t1 - t0;
float seconds = tdelta / (float)CORETIMER_FrequencyGet();

or the number of milliseconds:

uint32_t tdelta = t1 - t0;
float milliseconds = tdelta / (CORETIMER_FrequencyGet() / 1000.0);

or the number of microseconds:

uint32_t tdelta = t1 - t0;
float microseconds = tdelta / (CORETIMER_FrequencyGet() / 1000000.0);