Can anyone give me the approximate time (in nanoseconds) to access L1, L2 and L3 caches, as well as main memory on Intel i7 processors?
While this isn't specifically a programming question, knowing these kinds of speed details is neccessary for some low-latency programming challenges.
The bottom line?
Any low-latency motivated design has to rather reverse-engineer the "I/O-hydraulics" ( as 0 1-XFERs are incompressible by the nature ) and the resulting latencies rule the performance envelope for any GPGPU solution be it computationally intensive ( read: where processing costs are forgiving a bit more a poor latency XFERs ... ) or not ( read: where ( might be to someone's surprise ) CPU-s are faster in end-to-end processing, than GPU fabrics [citations available] ).