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Comment by wtallis | Hacker News Reader

> A more interesting example might be if each slot in the target array has the next index to go to in addition to the value, then you will introduce a dependency chain preventing this from happening.

However, on some processors there's a data-dependent prefetcher that will notice the pointer-like value and start prefetching that address before the CPU requests it.

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The data-dependent prefetcher is a cool feature, though you do have to be careful with side-channel issues, so some of them can disable it with the Data-Independent Timing bit or similar.

At this point I'm kinda expecting CPU vendors to stop putting as many Spectre mitigations in the main core, and just have a small crypto core with full-fat arithmetic, less hardware for memory access, less speculation, and careful side-channel hardening. You still have to block Meltdown and other large vulnerabilities on the main cores, but if someone wants to protect elliptic curves from weird attacks? Try to set the DIT bit, trap into the OS, and get sent to the hardened core.

Even if the prefetcher was capable of traversing pointers, it wouldn't help. The hypothetical benchmark wouldn't do anything other chasing pointers, and the prefetcher can't really do that any quicker. A traversing prefetcher is useful if the code actually does work for each traversed node, then the prefetcher (or the OoO machinery) could realistically run ahead.

Could probably overcome that by using integers, but converting them to a pointer after accessing (like '0'+1 is '1').

Do you mean storing the next index/offset and having the pointer value calculated as late as possible by adding the starting address (and maybe multiplying the index by sizeof)? That would probably defeat/mislead Intel's prefetcher, as described at https://www.intel.com/content/www/us/en/developer/articles/t...

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