In this presentation at the Northwest C++ User’s Group, Herb Sutter explains how your hardware and software jumps through perversely complicated hoops in order to prevent you, the programmer, having to deal with the chasm in performance between CPUs and memory. There are slides in PDF and a video.

The questions he asks are “what is the cost of this programming operation?” and “can I speed it up?”. The answers are much more complex that you think. He takes pains to explain the impact of memory latency on all aspects of programming.

Tags: Latency, Programming, Speed