This talk dives into how the latest CPU advancements from Intel and AMD impact performance and code optimization. While not C++-specific, these changes are often more relevant for the C++ programmers who, in high-performance systems, often take direct control of memory management and utilization of computational resources. As processors evolve with more cores and complex features, understanding these changes is crucial for writing high-performance C++. We'll cover why optimizations that worked well on older hardware might not be as effective on new CPUs and how to adjust your C++ code to take full advantage of the latest processor features.
We'll start by looking at what's new in the latest CPU architectures and why these changes matter for C++ programming. This includes discussing core counts, cache and memory hierarchies, and instruction set extensions, and how they influence performance.
Next, we'll tackle the issue of benchmarking. Traditional methods might not give the full picture on modern hardware, leading to misleading conclusions about code performance. We'll explore better ways to measure how your code performs on the latest processors.
The core of the talk will focus on optimizing C++ for these new CPUs. This includes strategies for effective parallelism, optimizing memory access, and making the most of hardware-specific features. We'll go through practical examples to show how these optimizations can be applied in real-world C++ code.
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Fedor G. Pikus is a Technical Fellow and the Director of the Advanced Projects Team at Siemens Digital Industries Software. His responsibilities include planning the long-term technical direction of Calibre products, directing and training the engineering teams, overseeing the design and architecture of the software, and researching new design and software technologies.
His earlier positions included Chief Scientist at Mentor Graphics (acquired by Siemens Software), Senior Software Engineer at Google, and Chief Software Architect for Calibre PERC, LVS, and DFM. He joined Mentor Graphics in 1998, making the switch from academic research in computational physics to the software industry.
Fedor is a recognized expert in high-performance computing and C++. He is an O'Reilly author and has written three books on C++ and software design. He is a regular instructor at the CppCon Academy, leading two of the best-attended classes, and has presented his work at CppNow, CppCon, CppNorth, SD West, DesignCon, and in various software development journals. Fedor holds over 30 patents and has authored over 100 papers and conference presentations on physics, EDA, software design, and the C++ language.