I recently discovered a series of articles written by Jon "Hannibal" Stokes on arstechnica.com . Usually, I stick to learning weird, exotic languages, but I'm really fascinated by his descriptions of modern processors. I'm especially fascinated by the idea of tuning modern day processors and programming techniques so that they take advantage of one another. For instance, C++'s use of automatic variables results in so many function calls, that if these function calls are not inlined, they can play hell on the pipeline, unless branch prediction works well. Having read Hannibal's articles on hyperthreading , SMT, and the Itanium-64 , IA-64, I became intriqued by the performance aspects of SMT on aspect oriented programming , AOP. AOP is currently confined mostly to the Java world, so it doesn't have a direct effect on the processor, per se, but I wondered if a natively compiled AOP compiler could better take advantage of an IA-64 processor. It would do this v