What are perf cache events meaning?

Question

I am trying to figure out why a modified C program is running faster than its non modified counter part (I am adding very few lines of code to perform some additional work).

Answer 1

According to perf tutorial, Performance Monitoring Unit (PMU) events or hardware events refer to those events which can be mapped directly to CPU specific events for a CPU vendor. But the hardware cache events refer to some hardware events monikers provided by perf, which may be mapped to actual events provided by the CPU. For the list of perf's cache events use perf list cache in Linux terminal.