I found this most interesting in the context of how to go about
parallelization: "...modern CPUs can execute hundreds of instructions in the
time taken to fetch a single datum from memory."  Even if this refers to
low-level instructions, it gives an idea of the importance of minimizing
data movement.

On Tue, Feb 16, 2010 at 1:35 PM, Don Guinn <[email protected]> wrote:

> Thanks for the reference. Interesting.
>
> Looks like L1 cache is always private to the core. L2 and above may be
> shared among all cores or not. The cache logic can get quite complex. Looks
> like there is as many possibilities for performance optimization with cache
> as with multiple cores. But probably inaccessible from C and is so
> different
> between models that it is probably unusable except in the most intensive
> applications. And they are looking at doing memoization in cache.
>
> On Tue, Feb 16, 2010 at 10:45 AM, David Mitchell <[email protected]
> >wrote:
>
> > On 2/16/2010 12:12, Don Guinn wrote:
> > > On Mon, Feb 15, 2010 at 7:42 PM, bill lam<[email protected]>  wrote:
> > >
> > >> . . . Given the large memory cache available in modern
> > >> computer, it is better to just keep memory reference locality. The
> > >> speed of transfer of data using socket would be slower than that
> > >> within cache by at least 2 order of magnitude, just wild guess.  . . .
> > >>
> > >> This touches on a question I have been wondering about. Is the cache
> > shared
> > > among multiple cores or does each one have its own cache? I would be
> > > surprised if it is shared as that could result in a big performance hit
> > if
> > > there are lots of cores. If the cache is private to each core then
> > somehow
> > > the data has to be moved from one cache to another. Main memory?
> > > ----------------------------------------------------------------------
> > > For information about J forums see http://www.jsoftware.com/forums.htm
> > >
> >
> > http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/L2_cache
> >
> > --
> > David Mitchell
> > ----------------------------------------------------------------------
> > For information about J forums see http://www.jsoftware.com/forums.htm
> >
> ----------------------------------------------------------------------
> For information about J forums see http://www.jsoftware.com/forums.htm
>



-- 
Devon McCormick, CFA
^me^ at acm.
org is my
preferred e-mail
----------------------------------------------------------------------
For information about J forums see http://www.jsoftware.com/forums.htm

Reply via email to