Uniprocessor Cost: Reality

• Modern processors use a variety of techniques for performance - (Superscalar / RISC)

  • caches
    • small amount of fast memory where values are “cached”
  • parallelism
    • superscalar processors have multiple “functional units”
  • pipelining
    • a form of parallelism

• Why is this your problem?

  • In theory, compilers understand all of this and can optimize your program; in practice they don’t.

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