OT: trends in L3 cache sizes (latency)

[Bill Bogstad]

On Thu, Mar 10, 2011 at 1:56 PM, Dan Ritter <dsr-mzpnVDyJpH4k7aNtvndDlA at public.gmane.org> wrote:
> On Thu, Mar 10, 2011 at 01:39:01PM -0500, Bill Bogstad wrote:
>> [question about CPU caches]
> Up to 12 MB, but you have to look at how it's split between cores, and how
> it's split between code and data. If you have to have all the data at one
> core, you may not be able to fit it all, and you very likely
> won't be able to control it.

Almost all data.  I was under the impression that L3 caches were
uniformly shared across all cores in current implementations.  Is this
incorrect?  I can probably get my job done with a single core as long
as there is enough low latency cache.

> How are you getting the data in and out? Variations in processor
> microcode and exact implementations of instruction sets are
> going to be interesting.

The data I need to access quickly is (relatively) static.   I don't
think that I care precisely how long it takes for the cache
implementation to migrate all of my 'hot' data into the L3 cache.

> Is this something amenable to parallel-processing via graphics
> coprocessors?

Yes, but I want stay away from specialized hardware as much as
possible.  The cost curve is rarely good for that kind of thing.
Admittedly, gaming has made graphics coprocessors a sufficiently large
market that performance per dollar has kept up with general CPUs for
quite a while now.  (Actually better for
parallelizable problems.)  I also don't want to deal with those kinds
of programming environments if I don't have to do so.

Bill Bogstad