Cache

Lab 2: Memory Hierarchy and Caches This is the hands-on report for the lab in /home/sanketh/mem-lab on the Linux x86 laptop. It is the practical companion to content/posts/performance-engineering/2026-10-11-memory-and-caches.markdown — every experiment measures something the theory note claims, and a few go past it. Same machine caveat as Lab 1: this is an Intel Core i5-8250U (15 W mobile part, base 1.6 GHz, max 3.4 GHz). It throttles under sustained load, so chase ratios, not absolute nanoseconds. All single-threaded timings below are pinned to one core with taskset -c 2. ...

Performance Engineering: Memory Hierarchy, Caches, and Data Layout This note is the natural follow-up to the CPU microarchitecture note. There we saw that the CPU retires instructions as fast as it can and stalls when it cannot overlap work. For most programs, the dominant reason it cannot overlap work is memory: data is not where the CPU needs it, when the CPU needs it. The goal here is to understand the cache hierarchy as a programmer sees it, how data layout controls cache behavior, and how to measure that behavior with the right tools. ...