AoS vs. SoA: Array of Structures versus Structure of Arrays
Описание
Today we'll look at a very interesting performance programming technique. It is used when programming SIMD, and stream processing hardware, like an SSE capable CPU or the GPU. It involves a perpendicular rotation of data in RAM. It is known as AoS vs. SoA (or SoA vs AoS). It stands for Array of Structures versus Structure of Arrays.
Most of the time we organize our data into structures, then we create arrays of these structures and work on the elements of the array with a loop. We can, however, organize our data into a single structure, which contains a arrays for each element of the previous structure. We are storing exactly the same data, it's just rotated.
The question this tutorial examines is, does rotating our data 90 degrees help performance? Are we able to better utilize the hardware's capabilities if we set out our data a little differently?
The choice of AoS or SoA is one that is easiest made at the start of a project. It is not often convenient to change an existing project from AoS to SoA.
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