| ▲ | adgjlsfhk1 3 days ago |
| while that's true, CPUs already have automatically managed caches. it's not too much of a stretch to imagine a world in which RAM is automatically managed as well and you don't have a distinction between RAM and persistent storage. in a spinning rust world, that never would have been possible, but with modern nvme, it's plausible. |
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| ▲ | bluGill 3 days ago | parent [-] |
| Cpus manage it, but ensuring your data structures are friendly to how they manage caches is one of the keys to fast programs - which some of us care about. |
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| ▲ | adgjlsfhk1 2 days ago | parent [-] | | Absolutely! And it certainly is true that for the most performance optimized codes, having manual cache management would be beneficial, but on the CPU side, at least, we've given up that power in favor of a simpler programming model. | | |
| ▲ | bluGill 2 days ago | parent [-] | | Part of giving up is what is correct changes too fast. Attempts to do this manually often got great results for a year and then made things worse for the next generation of CPU that did things differently. Anyone who needs manual control thus would need to target a specific CPU and be willing to spend hundreds of millions every year to update the next CPU - there is nobody who is willing to spend that much. The few who would be are better served by putting the important thing into a FPGA which is going to be faster yet for similar costs. |
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