>> The info on TLBs was quite interesting too. And all that NUMA stuff too.
>> But you begin to wonder what us programmers can actually *do* about all
>> this stuff.
> 
> NUMA's pretty important when writing server-type apps. The main point around
> Numa is that memory local to the node is orders of magnitude faster to
> access than remote memory.

Yeah, NUMA is one area where it's pretty obvious that you should be 
explicitly writing your application to take into account the [vast] 
differences in access speed.

I was thinking more about all the cache coherancy stuff. Unless you're 
writing in C or assembly, you really don't have much influence on where 
your data gets put and in what arrangement. Taking a language like 
Java... damn, the CPU must spend *so much* time chasing all those 
pointers that 100% cannot be pre-fetched... sheesh!

-- 
http://blog.orphi.me.uk/
http://www.zazzle.com/MathematicalOrchid*

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