> And also, does it imply the existence of non-blocking memory Prefetching instructions, to tell the processor to load before you use it! The first google hit

> And also, does it imply the existence of non-blocking memory Prefetching instructions, to tell the processor to load before you use it! The first google hit [0] even calls it non-blocking memory access! In [1] you can see some of the available prefetching instructions, and in [2] some analysis on how they deal with TLB misses (another extremely expensive way memory access can be blocking short of a page fault). Another thing not mentioned above is that accessing a page of newly allocated memory often causes a page fault, since allocation is often delayed until use of each page, for overcommitting behavior - same for writing to memory that is copy-on-write from a fork! [0] https://www.sciencedirect.com/topics/computer-science/prefetch-instruction#:~:text=Prefetch%20instructions%20are%20non%2Dblocking,have%20no%20other%20side%20effects https://www.sciencedirect.com/topics/computer-science/prefet.... [1] https://docs.oracle.com/cd/E36784_01/html/E36859/epmpw.html https://docs.oracle.com/cd/E36784_01/html/E36859/epmpw.html [2] https://stackoverflow.com/a/52377359/435796 https://stackoverflow.com/a/52377359/435796