4 ms·
As the article points out, every modern OS clears (main) memory before handing it over to a new process. The cost is often mitigated a bit by using spare CPU cy
by psi-squared 11y ago
As the article points out, every modern OS clears (main) memory before handing it over to a new process. The cost is often mitigated a bit by using spare CPU cycles to zero out free pages, and by keeping a buffer of such pages. You only need to pause to zero pages if you have sustained 100% CPU usage for a long time - and that's pretty rare on most machines. GPUs probable even more so.
GPUs generally have less memory, many fewer (but larger) allocations, and way higher memory bandwidth than CPUs, so it shouldn't be a problem for them to do this.