This link has been bookmarked by 23 people . It was first bookmarked on 01 Dec 2008, by George Debreceni.
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24 Aug 09
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15 Jun 09
Navneet KumarCPU - Cache - Memory - Disk
Performance Computer-Architecture Computing Hardware Windows
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one clock cycle to execute, hence a third of a nanosecond at 3.0Ghz. For reference, light only travels ~4 inches (10 cm) in the time taken by a clock cycle.
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To put this into perspective, reading from L1 cache is like grabbing a piece of paper from your desk (3 seconds), L2 cache is picking up a book from a nearby shelf (14 seconds), and main system memory is taking a 4-minute walk down the hall to buy a Twix bar
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For a discussion of all things memory, see Ulrich Drepper’s What Every Programmer Should Know About Memory (pdf), a fine paper on the subject.
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Keeping with the office analogy, waiting for a hard drive seek is like leaving the building to roam the earth for one year and three months.
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Filesystem defragmentation aims to keep files in continuous chunks on the disk to minimize seeks and boost throughput.
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06 Dec 08
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05 Dec 08
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03 Dec 08
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02 Dec 08
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The first thing that jumps out is how absurdly fast our processors are. Most simple instructions on the Core 2 take one clock cycle to execute, hence a third of a nanosecond at 3.0Ghz. For reference, light only travels ~4 inches (10 cm) in the time taken by a clock cycle. It’s worth keeping this in mind when you’re thinking of optimization - instructions are comically cheap to execute nowadays.
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Matthew MurphyThis post takes a look at the speed - latency and throughput - of various subsystems in a modern commodity PC, an Intel Core 2 Duo at 3.0GHz.
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This post takes a look at the speed - latency and throughput - of various subsystems in a modern commodity PC, an Intel Core 2 Duo at 3.0GHz. I hope to give a feel for the relative speed of each component and a cheatsheet for back-of-the-envelope performance calculations. I’ve tried to show real-world throughputs (the sources are posted as a comment) rather than theoretical maximums. Time units are nanoseconds (ns, 10-9 seconds), milliseconds (ms, 10-3 seconds), and seconds (s). Throughput units are in megabytes and gigabytes per second. Let’s start with CPU and memory, the north of the northbridge:
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01 Dec 08
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