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Sometimes tweaks like these might only save 10-20 cycles, which in a vacuum doesn't sound like much, until you consider that before the tweak, it started at 26 cycles and is now 6 cycles, and it's called 50 million times every second, which is a savings of 100 million cycles per second.

For games, this can mean a higher frame rate. For data processing, it can mean the data gets processed significantly faster. It's especially important for things like video encoders, where even a 1% savings in CPU time can translate directly to 1% more potential revenue for the same operating cost at a company that relies heavily on video encoding.

Yeah, saving those cycles doesn't really mean anything to a beginner, but they can be a huge savings for high performance computation applications.




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