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Re:C++11 async tutorial by jedbrown on Thursday October 18, 2012 @10:21AM (#4668861)
This is dangerous misinformation.

I'm sorry, but if your "math-heavy" code performs better when oversubscribed, then it is a massively suboptimal implementation. As a performance-oriented mathematical library developer, with colleagues at many of the major supercomputing centers and vendors, oversubscription is a hazard that we guard against on CPU architectures because it is always slower. Many supercomputing environments use a kernel that does not even support over-subscription.

Note that GPUs are different in the sense that over-decomposition is necessary to cover latency, but even there, you generally get better performance at lower occupancy due to better register reuse. SMT CPU systems, most notably, Blue Gene/Q, often require use of multiple hardware threads per core to cover instruction latency and keep the prefetcher busy (due to allocation of outstanding requests). This is not over-subscription because those are bonified hardware threads.

Re:C++11 async tutorial by alexchamberlain on Thursday October 18, 2012 @11:04AM (#4669090)
Can I pick your brains???

What happens during a cache miss? Does the thread block?

Re:C++11 async tutorial by lallysingh on Thursday October 18, 2012 @11:52AM (#4669344)
Other instructions in the same thread are executed (when they can be, e.g. all data's available). Or in another hyperthread on the same core.