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Subject: Re: Matt Taylor's magic de Bruijn Constant

Author: Eugene Nalimov

Date: 13:32:20 07/14/03

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On July 14, 2003 at 16:07:27, Robert Hyatt wrote:

>On July 14, 2003 at 15:33:37, Gerd Isenberg wrote:
>
>>On July 14, 2003 at 10:54:49, Vincent Diepeveen wrote:
>>
>>>On July 13, 2003 at 17:10:10, Russell Reagan wrote:
>>>
>>>>On July 13, 2003 at 13:17:56, Bas Hamstra wrote:
>>>>
>>>>>It is used *extremely* intensive. Therefore I assumed that most of the time the
>>>>>table sits in cache. But apparently no... Makes you wonder about other simple
>>>>>lookup's. A lot of 10 cycle penalties, it seems.
>>>>
>>>>Hi Bas,
>>>>
>>>>Why you say "10 cycles"? I thought memory latency was many more cycles (~75 -
>>>>150+).
>>>
>>>Random read from memory at dual P4 or dual K7 is like nearly 400 nanoseconds.
>>>So that's at 2Ghz around 800 cycles.
>>>
>>>Best regards,
>>>Vincent
>>
>>Hi Vincent,
>>
>>puhh... that's about 1/2 microsecond. I remember the days with
>>2MHz - 8085 or Z80 CPU - can't beleave it. A few questions...
>
>
>
>Don't believe it because it is _wrong_.  Run "lm-bench" on your computer.
>It will very accurately measure random access latency.  The slowest I have
>seen is 150ns on my dual, using registered DDRAM.  My laptop uses SDRAM and
>clocks in around 120ns.  My quad xeons are all around 125ns.
>
>I've not seen any 400+ ns numbers although it is very possible that rambus
>might be that slow on latency, although it is very fast on bandwidth.
>
>
>>
>>I'm not familar with dual-architectures. Is it a kind of shared memory via
>>pci-bus? How do you access such ram - are the some alloc like api-functions?
>>What happens, if one perocessor writes this memory through cache - what about
>>possible cache copies of this address in the other processor, or in general how
>>do the severel processor caches syncronise?
>>I guess each processor has it's own local main-memory.
>>
>
>
>
>No.  Each processor sits on the same bus with memory.  So both can access
>it independently.  However, cache coherency is a problem, but in the Intel
>world it is handled by some clever cache design so that the cache controllers
>are aware of what is being done by the "other cache" and knows when the other
>cache modifies a value that is in the local cache.  It's messy, but it works.
>
>Caches still use write-back update policy so that memory is not updated until
>the cache line (Modified cache line) is about to be overwritten.  However, if
>two caches have the same cache line (memory addresses) and one modifies any of
>the cache line, the other invalidates its copy so the next read will refresh
>things correctly.
>
>
>
>
>>Do you know the read latencies of single processor P4 or K7 with state of the
>>art chipsets?
>
>
>Typical numbers are in the 120-150ns range.  Lower for non-registered type
>memory.  Registered memory is mainly used in duals that are set up as servers,
>for higher reliability.
>
>Aaron has a sub-75ns latency machine that is overclocked.  That's the fastest
>PC latency I have ever seen.  In fact, it is probably the fastest latency of
>any kind I have seen, period.
>
>
>
>
>>
>>1.) if data is already in 1. level cache
>
>This is a one-cycle deal.
>
>
>
>>2.) if data is in 2. level cache but not in 1.
>
>This is something like 6 cycles but I don't think there is a standard
>"number" here since processor speeds vary so much.
>
>
>
>>3.) in worst case, if data is only in main memory but in no cache
>
>125ns is a good first approximation.

I had seen 700+ ns on a 32-way system. But that was a worst case, and changes in
the program helped -- read-only data was moved in a separate cache line, and
algorithm was changed to allow each CPU have its own writable data that are
merged together from time to time.

Thanks,
Eugene

>You can answer _all_ of the above by running lm-bench.  It will tell
>you each one of those numbers, plus others.
>
>
>
>
>>
>>Thanks in advance,
>>Gerd



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