[dhash]

My favorite illustrations for the concepts discussed here (in an accessible form, not the processor optimization manuals) has long been [0].

For me, this really makes working with a modern microprocessor a science, as anyone who has written benchmarks knows -- it's difficult to reason about the complex behaviour and performance cliffs without testing.

Another excellent example of the weirdness has to be JVM anatomy quarks [1]

[0] https://www.lighterra.com/papers/modernmicroprocessors/

[1] https://shipilev.net/jvm/anatomy-quarks/

[gpderetta]

The first link is very nice, worth of a submission of its own.

[titanomachy]

It was very good, I learned a lot. Actually more high-quality info than I can absorb in one sitting, but I bookmarked it to come back to.

I'd love to see an updated version. The article talks about how out-of-order execution has a high power overhead and produces relatively small performance gains, but the M-series chips from Apple have deep OOO and low power consumption; I'm curious to learn what they did differently.

[atq2119]

> I'm curious to learn what they did differently.

Being 20 years later than the original version of that article.

Silicon process improvements since then have been wild.

[aargh_aargh]

https://hn.algolia.com/?query=Modern%20Microprocessors%20%E2...