Wednesday
Room 2
16:20 - 17:20
(UTC+02)
Talk (60 min)
Unlocking Performance Through Reverse Engineering
For decades, CPUs provided substantial performance boosts with each new generation. This enabled us to improve productivity by introducing additional abstraction layers, such as higher-level programming languages and containerization. Unfortunately, these advancements have also reduced our direct interaction with the CPU while fully utilizing the CPU's potential for performance-critical software requires a thorough understanding of its intricacies. However, some of these details are only partially documented or even not disclosed, but they can be reverse-engineered!
In this talk, we'll discard all abstraction layers to uncover the intricate details of our CPU, whether they are disclosed or not. Through hands-on reverse-engineering techniques focused on a specific x86 CPU, we aim to unlock significant performance enhancements for our code. While our focus is on an x86 architecture, these techniques are transferable to any type of CPU and architecture. After this talk, I hope you see reverse engineering as not only insightful but also downright fun!