title: Multiple threads and CPU cache
body: <p>I am implementing an image filtering operation in C using multiple threads and making it as optimized as possible. I have one question though: If a memory is accessed by thread-0, and concurrently if the same memory is accessed by thread-1, will it get it from the cache ? This question stems from the possibility that these two threads could be running into two different cores of the CPU. So another way of putting this is: do all the cores share the same common cache memory ? </p>
  
  <p>Suppose i have a memory layout like the following</p>
  
  <p>int output[100];</p>
  
  <p>Assume there are 2 CPU cores and hence I spawn two threads to work concurrently. One scheme could be to divide the memory into two chunks, 0-49 and 50-99 and let each thread work on each chunk. Another way could be to let thread-0 work on even indices, like 0 2 4 and so on.. while the other thread work on odd indices like 1 3 5 .... This later technique is easier to implement (specially for 3D data) but I am not sure if I could use the cache efficiently this way.</p>