Hardware basics for software engineers
Hardware basics for software engineers Understanding hardware can feel distant for software folks, but a few core ideas help you write faster, cheaper, and more reliable code. This guide covers the essentials in plain language, with practical angles for developers, cloud engineers, and testers. CPU and memory basics The CPU handles work in parallel through cores and threads. More cores help with multi-tasking; more threads can improve responsiveness for concurrent workloads. Caches (L1, L2, L3) are tiny, fast storage close to the CPU. They speed up repeated data access. If your program repeatedly touches the same data, cache behavior matters. Main memory (RAM) size and speed matter for data-heavy apps. If you run out of memory, the system swaps to disk, which slows everything down. A typical rule is to match memory to the peak working set of your app. Real-world tip: for a web service, two or four vCPUs with enough RAM to hold hot data can outperform a single faster server if you need parallel processing. Storage and I/O ...