Lab 2: Memory Hierarchy and Caches
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. ...