@inproceedings{Schmidt:2025,
abstract = {Due to the increasing gap between {CPU} performance and memory bandwidth, memory access patterns play more and more a significant role for efficient data processing. The current core assumption is that a sequential access pattern delivers the best performance, especially when the data to be processed is stored in adjacent memory locations (contiguous memory). Given the continuous advances in memory technologies, it is of course questionable whether this assumption still holds true. To answer this question, we present a comprehensive experimental comparison of the sequential and the strided access pattern for data stored in contiguous memory on modern disruptive memory systems in this paper. As we are going to show, the core assumption must be revised, as the strided access pattern with a well-chosen stride size clearly outperforms the sequential access pattern. Even a {SIMD}-accelerated sequential access is considerably slower than the best-performing scalar strided access. In particular, we explain the differences, highlight further advantages, and present open challenges of the strided access pattern on disruptive memory systems.},
author = {Schmidt, Lennart and Kühn, Roland and Krause, Matti and Teubner, Jens and Lehner, Wolfgang and Habich, Dirk},
booktitle = {Proceedings of the 3rd Workshop on Disruptive Memory Systems},
date = {2025-10-13},
doi = {10.1145/3764862.3768174},
entrysubtype = {Workshop},
isbn = {9798400722264},
location = {New York, {NY}, {USA}},
pages = {19–26},
publisher = {Association for Computing Machinery},
series = {{DIMES} '25},
title = {To stride or not to stride the memory access?},
venue = {Seoul, Republic of Korea},
}
