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Cache hierarchy, or multi-level cache, is a memory architecture that uses a hierarchy of memory stores based on varying access speeds to cache data. Highly requested data is cached in high-speed access memory stores, allowing swifter access by central processing unit (CPU) cores.
Terms for data being missing from a higher level and needing to be fetched from a lower level are, respectively: register spilling (due to register pressure: register to cache), cache miss (cache to main memory), and (hard) page fault (main memory to disk). Modern programming languages mainly assume two levels of memory, main memory and disk ...
A CPU cache is a hardware cache used by the central processing unit (CPU) of a computer to reduce the average cost (time or energy) to access data from the main memory. [1] A cache is a smaller, faster memory, located closer to a processor core, which stores copies of the data from frequently used main memory locations.
The 3Cs group of cache misses can be extended to 4Cs when a multi-processor system with cache is involved, the fourth C being coherence misses. The coherence miss count is the number of memory accesses that miss because a cache line that would otherwise be present in the thread's cache has been invalidated by a write from another thread. [3]
The disadvantage is it requires significantly different programming techniques to use. It is very hard to adapt programs written in traditional languages such as C and C++ which present the programmer with a uniform view of a large address space (which is an illusion simulated by caches).
Memory is broken into blocks of objects each. A load or a store between main memory and a CPU register may now be serviced from the cache. If a load or a store cannot be serviced from the cache, it is called a cache miss. A cache miss results in one block being loaded from the main memory into the cache.
A memory address a is said to be n-byte aligned when a is a multiple of n (where n is a power of 2). In this context, a byte is the smallest unit of memory access, i.e. each memory address specifies a different byte. An n-byte aligned address would have a minimum of log 2 (n) least-significant zeros when expressed in binary.
The C Programming Language (sometimes termed K&R, after its authors' initials) is a computer programming book written by Brian Kernighan and Dennis Ritchie, the latter of whom originally designed and implemented the C programming language, as well as co-designed the Unix operating system with which development of the language was closely intertwined.