[userbinator]

Ditto for prefetch instructions:

https://lwn.net/Articles/444336/

A MIPS is probably the exact opposite to modern (which actually means anything P6 and above) x86 CPUs in terms of performance characteristics. If I were to guess what member of the x86 family might actually benefit from such optimisation, it would be NetBurst (which itself has very different performance characteristics from every other x86 family that came before or after it.)

[tkinom]

I was trying to optimize for a network app. The goal of trying to get to 1 million pps. At that time 200Mz CPU, 1 cache miss is 50+ cycles. or 25% of the CPU budget, prefetch helped a lot in that case.