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A Crash Course in Modern Hardware by Cliff Click

Devoxx · talk · Watch on YouTube

Computer architecture & CPUsSoftware performance & optimization

What it is

Cliff Click walks through a small performance example on a modern out-of-order CPU. He covers pipelining, ILP, CISC vs RISC, multicore, and why cache misses and the memory subsystem dominate performance.

Why Hacker News recommends it

Recommended as an accessible refresher on how modern hardware and caches affect software performance.

  • 3 people recommended it
  • 3 different months
  • 0 strong recommendations
  • first 2017, last 2025

What HN commenters said

  1. “it's a really accessible refresher if you're a bit outdated on how all these caches work and interact”

    Accessible refresher on how caches work and interact.

    zellyn, 2017-03 · Recommendation · in “Cold, Hard Cache – Insomniac Games’ Cache Simulator [slides]”

  2. “here are a few of his videos that I like.”

    Among Cliff Click videos the commenter likes.

    tjalfi, 2021-06 · Recommendation · in “Intel to disable TSX by default on more CPUs with new microcode”

  3. “You might enjoy the following talks on the subject”

    Suggested viewing on performance and microbenchmarking.

    NovaX, 2025-03 · Recommendation · in “Microbenchmarks: HashMap, ConcurrentHashMap, and Guava Caches”

Excerpts from Hacker News comments, linked to the originals. Summaries and labels were written by a language model from those comments.

Topics: cpu caches, out-of-order execution, memory performance, jvm, multicore

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