Can anyone give me the approximate time (in nanoseconds) to access L1, L2 and L3 caches, as well as main memory on Intel i7 processors?
While this isn't specifically a programming question, knowing these kinds of speed details is neccessary for some low-latency programming challenges.
Answer
Here is a Performance Analysis Guide for the i7 and Xeon range of processors. I should stress, this has what you need and more (for example, check page 22 for some timings & cycles for example).
Additionally, this page has some details on clock cycles etc. The second link served the following numbers:
Core i7 Xeon 5500 Series Data Source Latency (approximate) [Pg. 22]
local L1 CACHE hit, ~4 cycles ( 2.1 - 1.2 ns )
local L2 CACHE hit, ~10 cycles ( 5.3 - 3.0 ns )
local L3 CACHE hit, line unshared ~40 cycles ( 21.4 - 12.0 ns )
local L3 CACHE hit, shared line in another core ~65 cycles ( 34.8 - 19.5 ns )
local L3 CACHE hit, modified in another core ~75 cycles ( 40.2 - 22.5 ns )
remote L3 CACHE (Ref: Fig.1 [Pg. 5]) ~100-300 cycles ( 160.7 - 30.0 ns )
local DRAM ~60 ns
remote DRAM ~100 ns
EDIT2
:
The most important is the notice under the cited table, saying:
"NOTE: THESE VALUES ARE ROUGH APPROXIMATIONS. THEY DEPEND ON
CORE AND UNCORE FREQUENCIES, MEMORY SPEEDS, BIOS SETTINGS,
NUMBERS OF DIMMS, ETC,ETC..YOUR MILEAGE MAY VARY."
EDIT: I should highlight that, as well as timing/cycle information, the above intel document addresses much more (extremely) useful details of the i7 and Xeon range of processors (from a performance point of view).
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