The year so far has been filled with news of Spectre and Meltdown. These exploits take advantage of features like speculative execution, and memory access timing. What they have in common is the fact ...

This sponsored post from Intel explores ways to find and eliminate memory bottlenecks that could be limiting your applications’ performance. Often, it’s not enough to parallelize and vectorize an ...

When talking about CPU specifications, in addition to clock speed and number of cores/threads, ' CPU cache memory ' is sometimes mentioned. Developer Gabriel G. Cunha explains what this CPU cache ...

The processors in today’s computers have grown tremendously in performance, capabilities and complexity over the past decade. Clock speed has skyrocketed, and size has dwindled, even as the number of ...

In the early days of computing, everything ran quite a bit slower than what we see today. This was not only because the computers' central processing units – CPUs – were slow, but also because ...

When shopping for a new CPU, you're likely to come across many different CPU specifications, such as cores, clock speed, TDP, ...

In the eighties, computer processors became faster and faster, while memory access times stagnated and hindered additional performance increases. Something had to be done to speed up memory access and ...

In a computer, the entire memory can be separated into different levels based on access time and capacity. Figure 1 shows different levels in the memory hierarchy. Smaller and faster memories are kept ...