It's not just the sleeping state which this improves, it's the reduction in cache-misses for Level2 (Core2) and Level3 (i7) that this helps.
In my experience writing high performance VFX software, the Linux kernel's scheduler has been the best of all major OSs in terms of balancing threads since around 2.6.35.
OS X is the worst, it bounces threads all over the place, and on top of that, thread_policy_set() on OS X is only a hint, so often OS X will ignore affinity settings anyway.
Just tried google stalking a way to reach you but came short. I'm in vfx r&d and wanted to ask you more about your performance optimization techniques. You mind sending your email to hn@ikrima.com?
In my experience writing high performance VFX software, the Linux kernel's scheduler has been the best of all major OSs in terms of balancing threads since around 2.6.35.
OS X is the worst, it bounces threads all over the place, and on top of that, thread_policy_set() on OS X is only a hint, so often OS X will ignore affinity settings anyway.