Intel VTune tools are broken on Windows 7 64-bit

If you want to profile C++ executables on Windows 7 64-bit with an Intel CPU, don't bother downloading Intel VTune or Intel Thread Checker or Intel Profiler (AFAIK, all the same thing) - they all crash as of these versions:

"Intel(R) VTune(TM) Performance Analyzer 9.1 Build:385" and

"Intel® Thread Profiler 3.1 Build:0.27583"

...with this uninformative error message:

SERA_Set_Platform_environment() Failed

For those like me having the same problems who are still looking for a free profiler that works and can't wait for Intel to fix VTune, check out AMD's CodeAnalyst.

And yes, the time-based profiling for this AMD product works for an Intel CPU (i5 in my case) on Windows 7 64-bit as I've just confirmed... and the download size is a fraction of VTune. You can also see this blog post if you don't believe me!

In CodeAnalyst, you can get functions level percentage by clicking your application process cpu usage bar in the system graph - it will then open a separate tab with function level samples.

Interesting that the trial software from a big company like Intel doesn't work as well as a free (as in beer) software from a company one tenth the size. The fact that Microsoft can't be bothered to provide such a basic development functionality except in their very costly Visual C++ premium edition is unforgivable... Doesn't Microsoft want to show off the fastest apps on their platform?

Note also how much of a pain and expenses are involved in profiling on win32 compared to apt-get'ing gprof and running that on any Linux box!

It's frustrating to have to go through registration screens, Internet Explorer specific sites and a few hundreds megabytes download to discover these facts...