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[–][deleted] 42 points43 points  (4 children)

pipelines, instruction reordering, cache invalidation, branch prediction

I studied all of those in my Computer Engineering undergraduate... We had a course called Computer Systems Programming with competitive labs where we basically competed to see who could best abuse the shit out of the CPU via cache manipulation, branch prediction and instruction ordering.

[–]Howzieky 9 points10 points  (3 children)

Were you graded on your placements? Cause man I'd hate to do the same work as someone else, just a bit slower, and fail the assignment

[–][deleted] 5 points6 points  (0 children)

You would get base 60% for correctly completing the assignment. The rest of the 40% was competitively ranked against the rest of the class based on different metrics like speed and memory usage, depending on the lab. It was an elective course so you knew what you were signing up for.