Comment by danudey
5 days ago
Something like C++17's `std::hardware_destructive_interference_size` would be nice; being able to just say "Align this variable to whatever the cache line size is on the architecture I'm building for".
If you use these tricks to align everything to 64-byte boundaries you'll see those speedups on most common systems but lose them on e.g. Apple's ARM64 chips, and POWER7, 8, and 9 chips (128 byte cache line), s390x (256 byte cache line), etc. Having some way of doing the alignment dynamically based on the build target would be optimal.
Apple arm64 supposedly has 64-byte L1 cache line size and 128-byte L2? How does that work? Presumably the lines are independent in L1, but can different cores have exclusive access to adjacent lines? What's the point of narrower lines in L1?
Maybe the point isn't narrower lines in L1 but wider lines in L2? Implicitly bringing in more data to the L2 cache but allowing the CPU to pick smaller chunks of it into L1 cache to work on. Something like a forced prefetch or something? Honestly no idea.
Only landed in clang last year: https://github.com/llvm/llvm-project/pull/89446