How does cycle counting interact with CPU frequency scaling? Do you just assume that the CPU is at a fixed frequency for performance comparisons & analysis? (I suppose this is accurate for short lived benchmarks.)

I imagine you'd see some weird effects if the CPU changed its frequency during a benchmark, or if the process moved between cores since (as I understand it) the RAM would get faster relative to the CPU when the CPU is clocked lower. So some operations would take fewer cycles when the CPU is running slower.

Or am I misunderstanding what this is measuring?