What is the meaning of "non temporal" memory accesses in x86
Asked 07 September, 2021
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This is a somewhat low-level question. In x86 assembly there are two SSE instructions:


  

MOVDQA xmmi, m128

and


  

MOVNTDQA xmmi, m128

The IA-32 Software Developer's Manual says that the NT in MOVNTDQA stands for Non-Temporal, and that otherwise it's the same as MOVDQA.

My question is, what does Non-Temporal mean?

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