Programming in high-level languages like C# often presents the illusion that the CPU is only capable of a few primitive operations like “add,” “multiply,” “push,” “pop,” and “move.” After all, those are the primitive operations that we write all of our C# code with. The reality is quite different. Modern CPUs have hundreds of instructions for tons of special-purpose operations. Entire algorithms in C# are built right into the CPU and can be executed with one instruction. Today we’ll look at some of these exotic instructions as a reminder of what CPUs can really do and see how we can tap into this potential.
Posts Tagged cpu
Threads allow us do more than one thing at a time using the CPU’s cores, but it turns out we can do more than one thing at a time using just a single core! Today’s article shows you how you can do this and the huge speed boost it can give you!
We’ve seen how using the CPU’s cache can lead to a 13x speedup, but that’s only utilizing one of the CPU’s cache types. Today’s article shows you how to go further by utilizing a whole other type of CPU caching!
Last week’s article showed how to effectively use the CPU’s caches to boost performance by an order of magnitude. Today’s article goes even further to show you how to use even more of the CPU’s capabilities!
Most programmers write code for an abstract computer. The thing is- code runs on a real computer that works in a specific way. Even if your game is going to run on a wide range of devices, knowing some of the common features can speed up your code 10x or more. Today’s article shows you how!
At long last, Flash Player 11 has been released and carries with it a raft of exciting new features. Perhaps most exciting is the inclusion of the new Stage3D class (and related libraries) to enable GPU-accelerated graphics rendering. Today’s article will be the first to cover this new API and discusses one of its features: reading back the rendered scene into a BitmapData that you can put on the regular Stage. Surely this will be a popular operation for merging 3D and 2D, so let’s see how fast it is!