Over at the Mechanical Symphony blog, Martin Thompson writes that the “CPU Cache Flushing Fallacy” can cost you huge performance hits when coding your algorithms.
Next time you are developing an important algorithm, try pondering that a cache-miss is a lost opportunity to have executed ~500 CPU instructions! This is for a single-socket system, on a multi-socket system you can effectively double the lost opportunity as memory requests cross socket interconnects.
For all you programmers out there with a need for speed, I’d say this one is a “must read.” Check out the Full Story.