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THE CONTEXT SWITCH, Part II

• cost of register save/restore is linear with CPU speed
• cache/TLB effects depend on
  • frontside bus speed
  • memory speed
  • cache size
  • process working set size
• on modern x86 processors, register switch time is on the order of 10-50 microseconds
• Linux has very fast context switch code
• cache/TLB effects can double or quadruple that cost
• compare with 1333 microseconds: time available to process 64 frames at 48kHz