[jacquesm]

> I'm not familiar with the internals of the prefetcher of any CPU at this level

So better not speculate, what you think could be done when you are not familiar with the details typically tends to be a lot harder when you are familiar with the details and are tasked with the implementation. The devil is in the details and there is a very appreciable gap between theory and practice.

Further reading: http://www.futurechips.org/chip-design-for-all/prefetching.h...

Note the caution against using lists and trees and an advice to stick to arrays, which are typically accessed sequentially.

> Btw. you can add prefetch instructions in your code manually if you do linked list traversals or similar. In GCC you can use __builtin_prefetch() compiler intrinsic.

And that is exactly the point, if you don't supply the knowledge neither the processor nor the compiler can do this for you. If the processor or the compiler could do this then those __builtin_prefetch calls would not be required.

[orky7]

hardware prefetching mechanism is in core i7 that i know for sure, it automatically identify memory referencing pattern and attempts to fetch those blocks into cache before they are accessed, the detailed algorithm of prefetching are not documented...