> As I said, when you have pointers with some regularity (hence my reference to regular or patterned striding), then you may get some benefit of prefetching whe

> As I said, when you have pointers with some regularity (hence my reference to regular or patterned striding), then you may get some benefit of prefetching when you're not just dealing with linear contiguous access. I would need a source to believe this. The only way I can imagine this working is that the L2 prefetcher might incidentally work well with your allocator - your allocator might try to hand out more or less colocated or evenly strided data. > I'm not sure what you "don't buy" This statement, primarily: > Modern CPUs detect patterns of pointer chasing common in linked list use and prefetch to cache just fine To me, this statement reads as: 1. Prefetchers in CPUs can prefetch data by examining loads that have yet to be executed 2. That they do this well, or at least that's how I read "just fine" To my knowledge neither of those is true. > You appear to want to argue for some reason. I'm not trying to argue at all, I'm trying to learn. What you're saying does not sound right to be but it would be extremely interesting to me if I learned that CPUs are doing something that I'm not aware of. If you're actually saying that an allocator may end up striding allocations such that the prefetcher can reliably predict where to load next, sure I'll buy that, at least for L2. That's a fine thing to say, it just isn't what I took away from your initial statement, which is what I wanted to drill into because, again, it would be very interesting to me. Sorry if I'm coming off as argumentative, I was rushing that previous comment, which isn't really fair to put on you. I genuinely just am curious and if this is a case of miscommunication, no worries at all. I'd just be remiss if I didn't try to suss out if I'm wrong.