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November 17, 2010

Memory Tour De Force

What Every Programmer Should Know About Memory by Ulrich Drepper

Fascinating, enlightening, extremely useful (memory speeds have not kept up with progress in raw computing power in modern computers see, beware of cpu stalling!). Expect it to take a couple of weeks to get through it and really digest all of it, it's a self-contained mini-course in electrical engineering...

here is a diagram comparing memory access speed vs cpu speed evolution - notice the growing gap.
from another excellent read showing how proper memory access can dramatically speed up your program.

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