[pcordes]

I finally got around to re-ordering my answer to put the "cheating" ideas like gimping the compiler with atomic<uint64_t> on `-m32`, or atomic<long double>, at the end. I totally agree it was crap, but my answer just kind of grew that way, and left the good stuff buried.

I'm now pretty happy with my answer's presentation of some actually relevant ideas that are specific to slowing down an out-of-order pipelined CPU like Haswell. The assignment itself doesn't seem to have much scope for solving it the way it seems to be intended. There's not a lot you can do with those dependency chains that out-of-order execution isn't going to eat for breakfast.

Since the answer has gotten widely publicized, I've tried to include links for further reading on anything people might want to know more about. It's up to 28227 chars in length now, though :P