Not Your Father's Von Neumann Machine

nicholas on 2010-02-08T21:00:35

I really liked this talk - This Is Not Your Father's Von Neumann Machine by Cliff Click*

It's well worth watching. It has really nicely presented explanations of:

1. How and why a modern CPU executes out of order, and why cache misses are king.
2. How memory architecture means that two cores can cause writes to be read out of order, and the implications (your code goes boom^WSEGV).

* Brian Goetz was co-author of the talk, and co-presented it on its first outing, but this presentation of it just has Cliff Click.