CppCon 2017: Chandler Carruth “Going Nowhere Faster”

Why HN readers recommended it

Recommended as the best presentation on how modern CPUs run code, and why speculative execution matters for performance.

This is a summary from the source dataset, not an endorsement by Hacker News or the video creator.

Video & recommendation details

Creator / channel

CppCon

Topic

cpu performance tuning

Format

talk

Level

advanced

HN recommenders in dataset

2

HN mentions in dataset

5

Recommendation years in dataset

2017–2026

These counts and years describe the included Hacker News records; they are not YouTube views or the video’s publication date.

From the original HN conversations

Excerpts from the recorded comments. Follow each source for the full comment and surrounding discussion.

• The best presentation I've seen about CPU performance related to pipelining, branch prediction, and speculative execution was Chandler Carruth's "Going Nowhere Faster" presentation at CppCon 2017 [0]. I do recommend watching the whole presentation, but if you watch nothing else then just watch the 5 …

• Disclaimer: I am not an expert and have not measured. This is armchair theory. But, I would argue two things. First, the former appears to have at least one unaligned arithmetic: > 400538: mov 0x200b01(%rip),%rdx # 601040 <counter> ...while the latter's equivalent instruction is 4-byte …

• Chandler Carruth has a good talk with an example of why speculative execution is critical for performance. [VIDEO] It starts around 36m13s time frame.