In the eighties, computer processors became faster and faster, while memory access times stagnated and hindered additional performance increases. Something had to be done to speed up memory access and ...

In a computer, the entire memory can be separated into different levels based on access time and capacity. Figure 1 shows different levels in the memory hierarchy. Smaller and faster memories are kept ...

System-on-a-Chip (SoC) designers have a problem, a big problem in fact, Random Access Memory (RAM) is slow, too slow, it just can’t keep up. So they came up with a workaround and it is called cache ...

One of the greatest challenges facing the designers of many-core processors is resource contention. The chart below visually lays out the problem of resource contention, but for most of us the idea is ...

Researchers at North Carolina State University have developed a new AI-assisted tool that helps computer architects boost ...

Write-through: all cache memory writes are written to main memory, even if the data is retained in the cache, such as in the example in Figure 4.11. A cache line can be in two states – valid or ...

Researchers at MIT have created a new implementation for how the CPU cache interacts with the processor and data, by replacing the archaic fixed cache found in all modern processors. In every modern ...

There are three levels of Processor Cache viz; L1, L2, and L3. The more L2 and L3 cache your system has, the faster the data will be fetched, the faster the program will be executed, and the more ...

Editor’s Note: Demand for increasing functionality and performance in systems designs continues to drive the need for more memory even as hardware engineers balance the dynamics of system capability, ...

The disk cache in OS X can sometimes use a fair amount of the system's RAM, and clearing it can help you figure out how much RAM your applications and system processes are using. Topher, an avid Mac ...