Mechanical Sympathy

Sometimes when profiling a Java application it is necessary to understand the assembly code generated by the Hotspot JIT compiler. This can...

Even from highly experienced technologists I often hear talk about how certain operations cause a CPU cache to "flush".  This see...

In a previous article I reported what appeared to be a performance issue with CAS/LOCK instructions on the Sandy Bridge  microarchitecture...

Lately a number of people have suggested I start a discussion group on the subject of mechanical sympathy, so I've taken the plunge and...

In my last post I detailed the implications of the access patterns your code takes to main memory.  Since then I've had a lot of quest...

In high-performance computing it is often said that the cost of a cache-miss is the largest performance penalty for an algorithm.  For many...