Sometimes you don’t want to do anything. This is understandably human, and probably a sign you should either relax or get up and do something.
For processors, you sometimes do actually want to do absolutely nothing. Often this will be while waiting for a lock. You want to do nothing until the lock is free, but you want to be quick about it, you want to start work once that lock is free as soon as possible.
On CPU cores with more than one thread (e.g. hyperthreading on Intel, SMT on POWER) you likely want to let the other threads have all of the resources of the core if you’re sitting there waiting for something.
So, what do you do? On x86 there’s been the PAUSE instruction for a while and on POWER there’s been the SMT priority instructions.
The x86 PAUSE instruction delays execution of the next instruction for some amount …
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