Re: that's funny
People had thought of it and it has been in use for a very long time. Hell, even I wrote code to use a high resolution timer to determine cache efficiencies, work out stall times as well as speculative execution path lengths and code sequences for both failed and executed instructions paths. Admittedly it was for mainframe chips but the principle has been known about and been in use for a while, in testing at least. What happened is that the guys designing the Intel chips had other priorities. They also might have just forgotten about it. We always used to say that each iteration of the mainframe chip set reintroduced the problems of the last but one design as the people designing the new chips didn't understand the design decisions of the previous set of engineers.
Biting the hand that feeds IT
