I bet you don’t know what Intel RDT is.

Musings from a day in a life of a Cloud Native (software) engineer

“Sorry, RDT…?”, I replied sheepishly.

“Yes enable RDT on the machine and re-run the stress tests”, my boss replied.

And once again, I was thrown into the deep end of the pool. After some googling and reading of my team’s source code, here’s what I learnt.

What even is RDT?

RDT, or more specifically Intel RDT, is short for Resource Director Technology. It is a feature of Intel CPUs that allows administrators fine-grained control over the allocation and management of hardware resources, specifically CPU cache and memory bandwidth.

If you’re thinking, “huh…?” then you’re the right audience. Stick with me. Let’s go through what CPU cache and memory bandwidth are in the first place.

CPU Cache

What makes up a computer’s “memory”

Before we even get into what CPU cache is, we have to first understand that a computer has two types of memory: 1) Dynamic RAM and 2) Static RAM.

In short, Dynamic RAM is what we understand as RAM and acts as the computer’s main memory. Static RAM on the other hand, is used as the CPU cache.

Dynamic RAM uses capacitors to store data and needs to be constantly refreshed with electricity. Static RAM on the other hand, does…