········@gmail.com writes:
> In Peter Norvig's essay, "Teach Yourself Programming in Ten Years",
> he says it is a good idea for anybody interested in CS to find out
> certain details like -- " Know how long it takes your computer to
> execute an instruction, fetch a word from memory (with and without a
> cache miss), read consecutive words from disk, and seek to a new
> location on disk." He gives a table(values from 2001) for his PC.
> Can anyone tell me how to determine this accurately for a PC?
> Especially things like time taken to fetch something from L1 cache? Or
> is it something we have to look for the in the PC/processor manuals?
> This group may not be the apropriate place for the question, but
> I have always found good answers here and I feel the topic maybe
> relevant to a programmer of any language.
In addition to empirical timings, I highly recommend reading at least
one architecture spec, and one processor implementation manual. I can
highly recommend either SPARC and Sun's implementation, or Power PC
and Motorolla's implementation.
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