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Comment by mananaysiempre | Hacker News Reader

Modern microcontrollers can have DMA units that you can program to, among other things, do a memset or even a memcpy when the memory bus happens to be idle, and they’ll interrupt you when they’re done. The design point is different (a microcontroller application can be limited by processor cycles but rarely by memory bus bandwidth), but I still wonder why PCs don’t have anything like that.

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Programming Microcontrollers was such an interesting and different experience, designing code to be asynchronous in regards to memory operations was a whole 'nother level of arranging code.

Likewise for doing copies from external RAM to internal SRAM, it was slow enough compared to the 1 cycle latency accessing SRAM, and CPU cycles were precious enough, that code copying lots of memory from external memory was designed to stop execution and let other code run and resume once the copy was finished.

We were able to get some serious speed out of the 96mhz CPU because we optimized everything around our memory bus.

On a related note, Windows has a dedicated kernel thread solely for zeroing out freed memory, so, a new page allocation won't worry about zeroing the memory itself.

Just implement a driver for your memory controller and update all software to use syscall into kernel (about 10k total instructions per syscall), which will perform memset or memcpy, then measure performance improvement and tell it to us.

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