Getco coding challenge
This is the code I submitted as a first step in the Getco hiring process back in 2009. During the phone interview I was told I would need to spend three months in Chicago, so I dropped out at that point. The challenge was to write some code that figured out CPU cache sizes; you can see that in main.cpp which is, of course, win32 code.
The problem
Most modern CPUs use multiple levels of independent caches to reduce memory access time. Working with a dataset that fits within a smaller, faster cache will typically result in much quicker program execution. Applications like CPU-Z will gather cache information about your processor, but we'd like you to write a short program to estimate the sizes of the L1 (data) and L2 cache. You can assume that both caches have a size that is a power of 2 and are between 1KB and 16384KB (Not necessarily true, but we are only estimating).
Some research links
Here's some stuff I found handy in figuring out the problem.
Always good to start with wikipedia
No need to use push/pop, chance of scheduler interruption during measurement
Agner Fog on model specific register for performance monitoring events
CPUID for processor info. But Intel only gives us the L2 cache size directly.