When vectorization hits the memory wall: investigating the AVX2 memory gather instruction

When vectorization hits the memory wall: investigating the AVX2 memory gather instruction

For all the engineers who like to tinker with software performance, vectorization is the holy grail: if it vectorizes, this means that it runs faster. Unfortunately, many times this is not the case, and the results of forcing vectorization by any means can mean lower performance. This happens when vectorization hits the memory wall: although…

The price of dynamic memory: Memory Access

The price of dynamic memory: Memory Access

If your program uses dynamic memory, its speed will depend on allocation time but also on memory access time. Here we investigate how memory access time depends on the memory layout of your data structure. We also investigate ways to speed up your program by laying out your data structure optimally.