This repository demonstrates various hardware effects that can degrade application performance in surprising ways and that may be very hard to explain without knowledge of the low-level CPU and OS architecture. For each effect I try to create a proof of concept program that is as small as possible so that it can be understood easily.
Those effects obviously depend heavily on your CPU microarchitecture and model, so the demonstration programs may not showcase the slowdown on your CPU, but I try to make them as general as I can. That said, the examples are targeting x86-x64 processors (Intel and AMD) and may not make sense on other CPU architectures. I try to make them compatible with Windows, but they are mainly tested on Linux.
Currently the following effects are demonstrated:
bandwidth saturation
branch misprediction
branch target misprediction
cache aliasing
cache/memory hierarchy bandwidth
data dependencies
denormal floating point numbers
false sharing
hardware prefetching
memory-bound program
non-temporal stores
software prefetching
write combining
Firmware Security 