CPU Caches and Why You Care

Session Details

No matter what programming language or technology you use, if your software fails to make effective use of the underlying CPU caches, your system's performance will suffer. A lot. This session provides a wide-ranging overview of your CPU caches, how they operate, and how that affects high-level decisions on things like data structures and traversal strategies. Both single- and multi-threaded execution are considered. Specific topics include different cache types (data, instruction, TLB); private and shared caches; cache lines and speculative prefetching; false sharing; and cache-friendly program organization, data structures, and traversal strategies. If you care at all about performance, the information in this talk is essential. The fact that it's really interesting is simply a bonus :-)