4 ms·
To someone who is interested in bare metal, can you explain the significance of this? Is this how much data a CPU can handle simultaneously? Via instructions fr
by gabereiser 4y ago
To someone who is interested in bare metal, can you explain the significance of this? Is this how much data a CPU can handle simultaneously? Via instructions from the kernel?
- anyfoo 4y agoIt means how many instructions the CPU can decode at the same time, roughly to "figure out what they mean and dispatch what they actually have to do to the functional units of the CPU which will perform the work of the instruction". It is not directly how much data a superscalar CPU can handle in parallel, but still plays a role, in the sense that there is a number of functional units available in the CPU, and if you cannot keep those busy with decoded instructions, then they lay around unused. So a too narrow decoder can be one of the bottlenecks in optimal CPU usage (but note how as a sibling commenter mentioned, the complexity of the instructions/architecture is also important, e.g. a single CISC instruction may keep things pretty busy by itself). Whether the instructions come from the kernel or from userspace does not matter at all, they all go through the same decoder and functional units. The kernel/userspace differentiation is a higher level concept.