Infographics: Operation Costs in CPU Clock Cycles

lotuseclat79 · Nov 12, 2016

Infographics: Operation Costs in CPU Clock Cycles

Whenever we need to optimise the code, we should profile it, plain and simple. However, sometimes it makes sense just to know ballpark numbers for relative costs of some popular operations, so you won’t do grossly inefficient things from the very beginning (and hopefully won’t need to profile the program later.

So, here it goes – an infographics which should help to estimate costs of certain operations in CPU clocks cycles – and answer the questions such as “hey, how much L2 read usually costs?”. While answers to all these questions are more or less known, I don’t know of a single place where all of them are listed and put into perspective. Let’s also note that while the listed numbers, strictly speaking, apply only to modern x86/x64 CPUs, similar patterns of relative operation costs are expected to be observed on other modern CPUs with large multi-level caches (such as ARM Cortex A, or SPARC); on the other hand, MCUs (including ARM Cortex M) are different enough so some of the patterns may be different there.
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-- Tom

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Infographics: Operation Costs in CPU Clock Cycles

lotuseclat79 Registered Member

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Infographics: Operation Costs in CPU Clock Cycles

lotuseclat79 Registered Member

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